It is funny BUT, the irony is that even wxPython is built using Visual Studio… and Robin is an Open Source Hero, as documented by this very old wiki page:
Just thought I’d share something I found quite humorous… a while back, I heard about Microsoft’s “Open Source Hero” program, and being a curious type I signed up. Hey, I love me some Open Source, and I wanna be a hero, right?
My Hero Pack arrived a few days ago. It contains:
a 90-day trial of Visual Studio 2008
and
a 120-day trial of Windows Server 2008.
Now don’t get me wrong - I’m not ungrateful; I fully intend to try out Windows Server so I can see what I’ll be facing over the next few months. But Visual Studio? Open Source? Am I missing the joke here?
Any other Heros here? Anybody else find this as funny as I did?
Well, I’ll be… I obviously haven’t been paying enough attention; I sorta assumed it was done with gcc (obviously I haven’t compiled my own yet!)
Yes, Robin qualifies.
Still… Windows Server? You gotta admit, that’s teh funneh.
···
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 10:34 PM, Peter Damoc pdamoc@gmail.com wrote:
It is funny BUT, the irony is that even wxPython is built using Visual Studio… and Robin is an Open Source Hero, as documented by this very old wiki page:
They do give it away, it's called Visual C++ Express. You don't get the IDE, but the compiler/linker/libraries are enough to compile. Personally I use http://www.scons.org for my builds which doesn't tend to mess up dependencies and always produces clean, sane builds (the visual studio IDE is really bad at that and gave more than one builds where I debugged for 2 hours just to find out that deleting all files and recompiling solved some completely random crash in my application).
On the politics side I guess giving away VS for free is bad for open source projects in the end. And that's probably the main reason why they do it (at least in my opinion).
-Matthias
···
Am 24.04.2008, 21:45 Uhr, schrieb Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker@noaa.gov>:
Peter Damoc wrote:
It is funny BUT, the irony is that even wxPython is built using Visual Studio...
Which I presume Robin paid for.
If MS wanted to support Open Source heroes, they'd give away VS, not a 90 day trial.
Sorry for the late reply, this went lost under a pile of stuff in my inbox.
On the politics side I guess giving away VS for free is bad for open
source projects in the end.
Matthias,
Why do you think this? Most F/OSS projects are developed on linux or one
of the *BSDs, although more are now being ported to Microsoft. We've not
used anything Microsoft in more than a decade and haven't missed the
crashes, virii, costs, and hassles one bit.
Having tried to do serious C++ development on Linux for a whole year (almost daily) has been such a hassle for me that I went back to windows. It just wasn't productive enough. There were so many things where you had to fight with the OS instead of just using it that working was being really unproductive.
This outweighed any crashes (had more under linux than under windows!), virii (hadn't one since 1996), costs (windows comes with most pcs, visual c++ is for free now) and hassles (linux is was way worse on this side) by far.
Despite there is (was) no free IDE close to Visual Studio. I tried them all, KAnjuta or what it was called, Eclipse, lots of front-ends for gdb (commandline debug is a joke). All had lots of bugs, no functionality, needed 2 hours of custom compilation to even install.
Then there was package hell. Package hell is far worse than windows dll hell. Package hell makes a lot of things impossible when you need specific version of specific packages which link against specifici versions of other packages which cannot be installed in parallel to your current version of that package which is needed by another package .... Those problems scared me away. I was able to solve almost all of them in the end (some were definatly unsolveable). But I wanted to code, not fight a war with the OS.
For me Windows is the better development platform. Also easier to ship to. There are even things like standard pathes (note linxu doesn't even have those, they hich can change unpredictably between distros).
Microsoft keeps trying to crush linux, but so far all their efforts have
failed. What I'm waiting to see is the list of 200-someodd patents they
claim linux violates. If that was truly the case, they would have been in
court years ago. It's typical Microsoft FUD.
Of course Microsoft tries to scare linux people. And no, Microsoft has not failed. Except a few people who have the motivation/idealism to spend their precious time to fight with an OS and a bunch of certain application types linux doesn't appeal to a wide userbase. If I imagine my mother or my father trying to use it, they'd miserably fail.
-Matthias
···
Am 24.04.2008, 22:08 Uhr, schrieb Rich Shepard <rshepard@appl-ecosys.com>:
I don't want to get into platform wars here, but all of these are
solved problems on Linux. They are solved in different ways, and you
need to think about them in different directions - relying on your
Windows intuition will not lead you to the answers. That doesn't mean
that it's any more difficult than on Windows - just that you didn't
already know the answers, and that your existing knowledge didn't help
you find the answer.
You also degenerated rather badly into pointless trolling at the end.
I will resist the urge to correct you, in the hopes that you can take
something useful away from the discussion.
···
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Nitro <nitro@dr-code.org> wrote:
Sorry for the late reply, this went lost under a pile of stuff in my inbox.
Am 24.04.2008, 22:08 Uhr, schrieb Rich Shepard <rshepard@appl-ecosys.com>:
>
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Nitro wrote:
>
>
> > On the politics side I guess giving away VS for free is bad for open
> > source projects in the end.
> >
>
> Matthias,
>
> Why do you think this? Most F/OSS projects are developed on linux or one
> of the *BSDs, although more are now being ported to Microsoft. We've not
> used anything Microsoft in more than a decade and haven't missed the
> crashes, virii, costs, and hassles one bit.
>
Having tried to do serious C++ development on Linux for a whole year
(almost daily) has been such a hassle for me that I went back to windows. It
just wasn't productive enough. There were so many things where you had to
fight with the OS instead of just using it that working was being really
unproductive.
This outweighed any crashes (had more under linux than under windows!),
virii (hadn't one since 1996), costs (windows comes with most pcs, visual
c++ is for free now) and hassles (linux is was way worse on this side) by
far.
Despite there is (was) no free IDE close to Visual Studio. I tried them
all, KAnjuta or what it was called, Eclipse, lots of front-ends for gdb
(commandline debug is a joke). All had lots of bugs, no functionality,
needed 2 hours of custom compilation to even install.
Then there was package hell. Package hell is far worse than windows dll
hell. Package hell makes a lot of things impossible when you need specific
version of specific packages which link against specifici versions of other
packages which cannot be installed in parallel to your current version of
that package which is needed by another package .... Those problems scared
me away. I was able to solve almost all of them in the end (some were
definatly unsolveable). But I wanted to code, not fight a war with the OS.
For me Windows is the better development platform. Also easier to ship to.
There are even things like standard pathes (note linxu doesn't even have
those, they hich can change unpredictably between distros).
> Microsoft keeps trying to crush linux, but so far all their efforts have
> failed. What I'm waiting to see is the list of 200-someodd patents they
> claim linux violates. If that was truly the case, they would have been in
> court years ago. It's typical Microsoft FUD.
>
Of course Microsoft tries to scare linux people. And no, Microsoft has not
failed. Except a few people who have the motivation/idealism to spend their
precious time to fight with an OS and a bunch of certain application types
linux doesn't appeal to a wide userbase. If I imagine my mother or my father
trying to use it, they'd miserably fail.
Having tried to do serious C++ development on Linux for a whole year (almost daily) has been such a hassle for me that I went back to windows. It just wasn't productive enough. There were so many things where you had to fight with the OS instead of just using it that working was being really unproductive.