On Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:46:19 EST, Ureleet said: > doesnt this work for other oses? Much of the competition are all Unix/Linux based, and as such the APIs are *very* similar from one to another. As a result, you get 2 effects: 1) MacOX, Solaris, RedHat Enterprise (and so on) all have mostly the same POSIX API, so a vendor can get stuff working on one, and have a pretty easy time moving to another. If you're being careful in your coding and avoiding most of the weirder vendor-specific extensions, moving from (for instance) Solaris to RHEL is actually easier than XP->Vista. So if your OS vendor screws the pooch, you can often get your application for another system. 2) Since there *isn't* as strong a lock-in as with a Microsoft OS, all the OS vendors have a big incentive to *not* screw the pooch by making radical incompatible changes - they get done in evolutionary compatible ways. And since the OS is all open-source, an enhancement done by one vendor will eventually show up in the others if it's a useful feature (there's been a number of things that have over the years crossed from Linux into the *BSD/Darwin/OSX world and visa versa). Also, most of the open-source companies have a totally different business model. They can't make much money selling me open-source bits - what we pay them for is *support*. I hit a bug, but I have better things to do than track it down - I throw it at the vendor, and they do the bugfixing and ship me a new version. A new release of OpenOffice comes out, with different pre-requisites, I pay the vendor to sort it all out and build it to save me the time and effort. So Microsoft has good economic reasons to *not* fix stuff so they keep their customers captive - while RedHat's survival depends on them shipping me stuff that *works*. Different market niche, different mindset, different results.
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