Re: [Hampshire] Re: Application installers

On 22/02/2008, Stephen Pelc <stephen@???> wrote:
>
> There's a quantity of businesses looking seriously at how to
> work in the Linux arena, and *planning* ways to migrate some or
> all of their business to that arena. Managing that change is
> essential for survival. The FLOSS arena has a completely
> different business model, but there *is* a business model.
>
> Shrieking at our engineers is counter-productive. Telling us
> *why* and suggesting *how* to do it better is productive.
>
> Yes, we do care, especially because the vast majority of alpha
> problem reports in the last month or so have been Debian
> installation issues. It's costing me a fortune! It would
> probably have been quicker and cheaper to buy InstallShield.
>
> Stephen
>

The Linux arena is very different from the Windows one. It always has
been, and most likely always will. It is a matter of points of view
and perception.
Windows generally only have one platform target, x86 in 32bit.
Recently it added a new one being x86 64bit. Linux has multiple
platform targets and always will, be in cpu type, or libary versions.
If one distributes binary only software to multiple platform targets,
it will be expensive. If one distributes source code software, one can
quite easily write the software to be one source code base for all
platforms. This is the way the Linux world have approached the
multiple platform problem and it is a very neat and cheap solution to
the problem. You are choosing to take the difficult and expensive
route. You cannot blame the Linux community for that.

James