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Desktop Linux: The dream is dead

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Renegade:
You can't pay your bills/support your familly by programming for free software in india. Atleast this is truth for this part of the world. Open source ? that is different discussion.
-mahesh2k (November 14, 2010, 07:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

There are ways to make money with free software. Lots of ways. Unfortunately, they are all pretty complex and require teams to pull off. You can't really do it by yourself and expect success. You need a dedicated sales/promotion/marketing guy and a programmer at a minimum.

mahesh2k:
Exactly. Single programmer is going to get kicked out in this model. He can't even raise money to this type of startup,so hard to think of hiring more employees.

As i said earlier in this thread- point is people here in this part of the world will not pay a dime if the operating system is free and the software that comes with it is also free. Donation can't pay for your family expense and bills. Such customers assume that software support and the maintenance should be free as well. This is business breaker and single guy can't target this model atleast in this country. Yes you can force them to buy themes for wordpress but they'll think thrice before buying a plugin. I don't know how they differentiate between this. I guess such freebie-lovers think - bench should be free and i'll pay only for painting this bench.  ;D

Renegade:
Content... While it seems cheesy, it's a revenue model... Themes and skins and whatnot fit in there. Still, it seems almost dirty...

JavaJones:
I don't understand what you mean when you say Mono is the only true cross platform development solution. Do you mean the only cross platform toolkit, or IDE? Because last I checked regulary old C/C++ code is pretty easily cross platform. Er, Java even more so, but that's going to be slower than .NET in general I guess. If a cross platform GUI toolkit is needed to complete the package, what about Qt? I say all this as part of a company looking to port a Windows/Mac app to Linux within the next year...

Other than that I think I generally agree with what you're saying. There is definitely the *perception* that Linux users will not generally pay for software. Some industries/markets are exceptions, like the noted visual effects industry example, but that's actually a comparatively small market (one which our product targets :D). For the broader market of consumer or prosumer software, most people running Linux would seem to be serious hobbyists or IT people, who are generally savvy enough to find most software for free, and if they do pay for software, are very serious with their value requirements.

I do wonder just how well Photoshop would do on Linux actually; I don't take it for granted it that would succeed so greatly as others here have said. What do you base taht on? Don't you think the majority of people who need to use Photoshop, or want to use it enough to pay for it, are already running Windows? Perhaps the suggestion is that there are enough people who really want to switch from Windows/Mac, but are waiting for their needed software to be ported?

- Oshyan

Renegade:
I probably exaggerated a bit... Or maybe a lot. :)

Mono has an entire framework along with it. So you don't have to mess around with finding parts here and there. It's also a large project with a community to back it up, and a massive larger C# community. You don't get that with RealBasic, although RealBasic still offers a viable cross-platform solution.

Java, well, it's probably much better than before, but it ended up being write once, break everywhere. I don't know if it's viable on the desktop. Someone that knows more would do better to comment on it. Just from what I've seen though, I can't see opting for Java. It just seems like all the Java stuff out there is server and enterprise stuff. Cross-platform isn't really so much of an issue in server environments because you need to commit to the server in a very deep way, unlike the way in which you commit to a desktop, which is rather shallow by comparison.

C/C++... Sigh... Well, it's a toolkit issue there. Qt might be ok. The last time I tried to work with it I just got frustrated and gave up. I just kept running into issues again and again.

I suppose that my main concern is getting things done fast and easy and keeping productivity high. C/C++ just doesn't do that for me. It just seems that everything takes so long to get done. The point of cross-platform is so that you reduce the amount of work that you have to do. I'm just not a big C fan.

I suppose it's the framework that comes with Mono that I find so attractive. It gives you so much for so little effort.


You've got a point there about IT people paying for software. We kind of cut our own throats in a lot of ways. Some things we'll pay for, and other things we simply won't spend a dime on. That makes some markets non-viable and others very profitable.

I buy components all the time. I don't buy a lot of other kinds of software. Quite often I end up programming my own software to get a job done. Those things I rarely ever release though. They sit and rot on a hard drive and I never look at them again, or rarely.

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