Re: Why no TextMate for Linux?

On 2010-03-13, David Masover <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Friday 12 March 2010 07:00:06 pm Seebs wrote:
>> Non-comparable.  No fundamental civil rights are infringed when I'm told
>> I can't burn *someone else's* American flag.  My right to write software
>> is not infringed by my lack of a right to modify someone else's without
>> permission.

> I suppose that's the difference between buying and renting software.

Sort of.

It is not obvious that "buying" a thing necessarily in all cases entails
the right to manipulate it in arbitrary ways.

> Put another way, I'm not saying I should be able to burn someone else's flag. 
> But if you sold me a flag, why should that automatically allow you to dictate 
> how I use it? Should I have to sign a no-burning contract before any flag I 
> buy?

Should you have to before buying any flag?  No.  Should it be possible for
someone to sell you a flag only if you agree to sign a no-burning contract?
Sure.  Should that contract be enforceable?  I'd say in general it should.

If you don't like it, don't buy from that vendor.

> Regardless, the point was not that this is an essential right, and that's 
> clearly hyperbole (on my part). The point is that it's important to me to have 
> that ability, whether or not I have a clear and present need for it.

I think it's certainly *potentially* useful, but I've found that in many
cases, it's not so useful as to make me abandon something else I care about.

> I haven't seen much of that, not that it matters -- the point is that 
> generally, open code that has a userbase of programmers will be maintained 
> across those versions, and even the old, unpopular versions are often forked 
> and maintained. Neither of these is guaranteed for proprietary software.

Neither of them is guaranteed for anything.  I'd say, though, that I've
seen a lot better support for five-year-old proprietary software than I
usually have for two-year old open source -- because open source users
tend to be a lot more willing to upgrade, since it's close to free to do
so.

People whose livelihood depends on the quality of their support have
an incentive to meet user demands.

> Could be -- though I was under the impression that most libraries are included 
> with the program, and that this was an advantage of the .app folder concept.

Only libraries which aren't standard system frmaeworks.

> VLC isn't the only example, but the obvious ones that come to mind are things 
> like a virtual desktop manager (pre-Spaces), which likely fits your criteria 
> of being a low-level hack, something you'd expect to break.

Yes.  I had one, it broke, I was not surprised.  But it was definitely worth
it, to me, to have a working virtual desktop manager for the year or so I had
it, even though it's obviously worthless now.  A good use of money.

> It's also an argument against considering Windows to be the basis of your 
> business or livelihood, unless you're willing to accept that upgrade 
> treadmill. Again, before Win7, the choice was likely between XP and Vista, and 
> many savvier consumers disliked Vista with a passion.

Yes.

But for some users, that upgrade treadmill may be worth it -- especially if,
say, you gain enough benefit from a particular Windows-only app that it
is more efficient to upgrade frequently than to make do with something else.

> And the only way out? Win7. But that was, again, depending wholly on Microsoft 
> to solve the issue.

Sure.

But so what?  People in general know that going in, and sometimes they make
the decision that it's the right tradeoff.  I'm not trying to argue that
there's no downside to a proprietary solution -- only that it's not at all
obvious that it'll always, or even usually, be foolish to pick one.

>> Not particularly high -- but an editor isn't comparable to an OS (unless
>> it's emacs).  I don't have to worry about new malware targeting my editor,

> With textmate having its own URL schema, yes, you do. And that's ignoring 
> other stuff that you'd hope is easy to get right, like proper handling of the 
> text itself.

I don't use that feature.  So all I care about is plain text.

> I'm not arguing that.

It comes across as if you are.

> I'm arguing that it is a huge benefit, and I'm puzzled that people place so 
> little value on it, especially when I presume it's exactly this kind of 
> benefit that would lead someone to Ruby in the first place.

Not really.  What leads me to Ruby in the first place is that it's pleasant
to work with.  If I wanted something less vendor-dependant or less likely
to be suddenly changed out from under me, leaving me with no practical
support, there are probably half a dozen languages I'd be better off with.

Keep in mind, an option you can't actually use is not a real option.  I'm
comfortable enough with C to have diagnosed an arcane memory management bug
in the pgsql driver.  Not many other people I know would have had a good
chance of finding that bug -- meaning that in practice, access to the
source would not really be useful to them.

For many, many, people, the direct advantages of open source are a pure
non-issue.  I'd bet that most Ruby developers would not be usefully able
to modify the Ruby source to fix a language-implementation bug.  So why
should they care whether they have source or not?

> Adium was good. I like Kopete, these days.

I try KDE occasionally.  Around 4.x, they had a wonderful feature, which
was that they never in any way saved user keybindings, such that every
login got you all the defaults again.  I guess maybe I'll try again sometime,
but that's a level of quality control I would normally associate with
Microsoft...

>> I don't view choice of editor as really being a matter of "completely
>>  redo". It's one of many tools I use, and if I switch, well, I use a
>>  different editor. Whatever.

> Right, that's the major difference between an editor and the kind of tool that 
> justifies this long of a discussion. For example, your iPhone projects sound 
> like they're of the type where it would be a significant effort, possibly even 
> a full rewrite, to port them to another platform.

Yup.

>> Yeah, I did actually set up samba.  Three times.  It was a nightmare to
>> get it working reliably with several different windows systems, the
>> documentation was crap, and it crashed fairly often.

> Can't speak much for the documentation, but I have created Samba setups 
> (fairly simply) which worked, out of the box, on every Windows I came across. 
> I have never once seen Samba crash.

YMMV.  In my case, the net result was that switching the home server to OS X
trimmed many hours of tedious work off my list.  I'm probably gonna get
a new OS X server machine in the next couple of weeks, which will replace
two or three existing machines.

> I enjoy sysadmin work, but I've also gotten a static webserver working in 
> under five minutes, and a local torrent tracker (complete with relevant 
> torrents) in under half an hour (due to crap documentation).

In general, I can do sysadmin, it's just not fun or exciting to me.  I'd
rather not have to.  I enjoy coding, I don't enjoy wrestling with startup
scripts.  I got a jabber server up and running... It was a pain.  The
next time I do server stuff, I'll put in OS X server, click "enable chat
server", and have a working jabber server.  It won't crash.  It won't
have a mysterious bug that took me a dozen reboots to track down causing
it not to start up when started from /etc/rc.local even though it starts
fine when invoked from the command line.  I won't have to replace it with
a different one due to a crashing bug that no one cares about, or build
a programming language environment before I can use it.  And that's worth
a fair bit of money to me.

This comes back to why I like Ruby:  Use the right tool for the job.
Open source is usually a bonus for most tools, but it is often much less
important than other features.  I only occasionally see a pure choice
between genuinely equivalent things, one of which is open source.
Usually, there's many other factors which are more significant.

-s
-- 
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed.  Peter Seebach / [e-mail]
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