[Discuss] Essentially all free apps will soon be available onWindows

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-02-19 14:01-0800 Daniel M. German wrote:

> [out of order]I think many developers develop because it is a hobby, not because
> they care about their users, or to increase their user-base.

There may well be lots of hobby projects which are never distributed and
developers who also don't care about users or the size of their user base.
But that is not relevant to the topic being discussed which is the behaviour
of _free_ software developers who almost by definition want to distribute
their work and increase its number of users.

> Alan W Irwin twisted the bytes to say:
> Alan> Fundamentally,
> Alan> free software developers want to spread freedom through porting their apps
> Alan> to as many platforms as possible.
>
> I challenge this assertion. I don't think we really know the answer.
>

I think it just comes with the territory of how free software
advocates/developers proselytize their work.

However, if you need proof then you could ask what fraction of the free
software producing projects registered at SourceForge will have a windows
port now versus one year from now. (Pay attention to the "producing"
adjective I was careful to put in there since some of the ~140,000 free
software projects registered at SourceForge are not producing or maintaining
code.) To make the test easier, I have observed that most projects with
windows ports have a windows binary file release so you could just look for
that.  (Plplot and libLASi do not yet have such binary releases for windows,
but we plan to do it soon.) I don't have the time to do this test for
myself, but presumably a random sample of ~1000 active SF projects should
give you the definitive proof you desire.  Time to inspire a graduate
student to do all that work. :-)

A recent paradigm shift relevant to this topic and the time scale of roughly
one year from now that I specified for the above test is that CMake has
matured to the point where it satisfies KDE's build needs, and therefore
(from my experience with two projects and the experience of many other
projects) it can essentially satisfy everybody's build needs regardless of
platform. There are a large number of projects that are switching to CMake
as we speak from the daily questions that are being asked on the CMake
mailing list.  As others in this thread pointed out, even before CMake
matured, there were plenty of free software projects (e.g., Python, perl,
gcc) which made high-quality windows ports with non-CMake build systems.  It
is still not trivial to make a windows port of free software, but it has
just now gotten a whole lot easier because of the CMake maturation. It is
for this reason, that I am predicting the fraction of free applications with
a windows port will substantially increase in a year or so.  But by all
means, inspire a graduate student to do the required before and after study
so we can all find out.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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