[ Thanks to Bob Grabau for this
link. ]
“Change is a great way to polarize any community. It should come
as no great surprise that when Inprise announced plans to develop
RAD tools for the Linux platform, the responses from the Borland
developer community were stereo cries of “Oh Yes!” and “Oh No!”
with a background channel of “uh, what?” I’d like to address
some of the commonly expressed fears, misconceptions, and even
misplaced euphoria I’ve heard from various quarters since the
announcement. These are my personal opinions, not Borland/Inprise
company policy.”
“Why Linux? Why not BeOS, or Mac OS10, or Solaris, or
?
Linux was the fastest-growing OS in commercial installations in
1998 and 1999, and those commercial installations are buying every
means of support and technology they can find. Even when the
software can be obtained for free (or perhaps because of it),
corporations buy support. It makes perfect business sense to spend
money to protect and fortify your mission-critical and
business-critical systems. It doesn’t matter to your business that
the stuff running your critical systems is a free download – except
when it’s 100,000 times cheaper than the alternatives. (Some of the
“big iron” UNIX OS licenses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a
year, every year. Linux runs on the same hardware, at the cost of a
free download, or less than $100 for shrink-wrap retail. You do the
math.)”
“There are so many Linux flavors, e.g. Red Hat, Corel,
Slackware, Suse, TurboLinux, Bob’s Linux, etc. Testing our
applications will be a nightmare!
Yeah, so? How is this different from testing Windows applications
on the many flavors of the Win32 platform? Proper testing of Win32
applications today should include testing on the following distinct
platforms: “virgin” Windows 95, Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 95 with
IE4, Windows 95 with IE5, Windows 95 with DCOM, Windows 98, Windows
98 Second Edition, Windows 98 with IE5, Windows NT 4.0 SP3, Windows
NT 4.0 with IE5, and Windows 2000. Linux is no worse. Ultimately,
it comes down to defining what platforms you must support, and have
the resources to test against. Anything else is then technically
not supported.”