While some may feel these are just flames, I work hard to write these pieces eloquently, and to support my positions effectively and make convincing arguments. Not everyone who reads what I have to say is happy about it - my writing has gotten me unsubscribed from mailing lists and I even recieved one mail from a technical recruiter asking why I was trying to take the food from his child's mouth.
I'd like to suggest that, if you feel the need to flame someone, that you strive do it it right. Your flames should be your art. Put time and effort into it. Think carefully about what you have to say, read back over what you've written before you post it, and edit your work for grammar, spelling and content. It is very helpful to use the search engines to research relevant URLs to include in your work, especially if you are posting to a discussion forum like Slashdot that allows HTML postings. (Hint - good hyperlinks in Slashdot comments will boost your karma.)
Finally, archive your flames on your web page.
I'm starting to collect my opinion pieces here in one place for ready reference. There's a lot to add, so please bookmark this page and return from time to time.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
Posting this message got me unsubscribed from the bedevtalk@be.com mailing list by the list moderator, who felt that it was inappropriate to discuss business issues of concern to working programmers on the company's third-party developer mailing list.
I propose to take the power of OS vendors to abuse independent developers away from them by promoting the use of cross-platform application frameworks which allow one to build native executable applications that will run on any operating system from a common code base.
One such cross-platform framework is ZooLib, written by my friend Andy Green originally to protect himself from the capriciousness of Apple Computer and soon to be released as open source software.
If a developer should find that an OS vendor is not serving his needs or the needs of his users, but he has written his program to the native Application Programming Interface of the operating system, he's in a bind - he has the choice either spending months or years porting his program to a new operating system, and expending vast sums of money and struggling to maintain multiple codebases during development, or sufferring under the abuse of the OS vendor. But if he has built his application with a quality cross-platform framework, he can retarget his application to a new OS in a few days or weeks.
If a forward-thinking developer should choose to ship his application on multiple platforms simultaneously, then the user is free to choose the platform which suits their needs best, based on personal preference rather than the limited availability of applications which meet their needs. OS vendors will then be required to differentiate themselves on substantial factors like quality, reliability, performance and ease of use and programming.
Not everyone feels that this is the right way to run a software company. Maybe, for some really warped reason, that is why some others are wealthy while I am not:
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed... The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard... And so, in no sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.-- Bill Gates, as quoted by The Software Conspiracy
