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they would not have been able to compete with some open source port of the VNC client That depends on the culture of your open platform. The Mac OS is an open
by mechanical_fish 16y ago
they would not have been able to compete with some open source port of the VNC client
That depends on the culture of your open platform. The Mac OS is an open platform -- in the sense that you can compile and run any open source software you want on a Mac -- but there are quite a few Mac apps that successfully compete against open source "equivalents". Consider Transmit: An FTP/SSH/EC2 app. Or Textmate: A text editor for programmers.
It's not the platform that matters. It's the customer base. It doesn't matter how many users the platform has; what matters is whether they have money and are willing to spend it for higher quality, less wasted time, greater ease of use, or some other value that your software provides.
I'm not sure there's any first-order reason why people couldn't develop a really polished VNC client for, say, Linux and make money on it. There are just second-order reasons: Linux is a fragmented software platform (many distros, many moving parts), running on incredibly diverse hardware, with a culture that actively discourages charging money for software and has therefore built little or no infrastructure or culture to support such business. Most difficult of all, Linux must compete with the Mac, which has built a culture of paying for quality and has used it to vacuum up many of the most valuable desktop-software customers.
- jacquesm 16y agoTransmit I would consider 'at risk', of having their lunch eaten one of these days, textmate (like ultraedit) has a loyal following and will be here for the time being. If it was as easy to apt-get some package on to the mac as it is to install stuff on most linuxes (or 'yum' if that's your flavour) I think that would change matters considerably. The initial hurdle to deployment is the hard one, if there would be a package manager with a sizeable repository installed by default on OS/X I think it would make life much harder for those earning a living writing software. Just like 'tucows' changed the world of closed source utilities for sale on the PC platform, only then a bit more dramatic because the vanguard would already be pre-installed. Openness includes removing barriers to getting at stuff, not just that it is 'open' to modification, I suspect the majority of the 'hackers' on this forum have never modified a line of code in most of the stuff they download and install.
- ptomato 16y ago"If it was as easy to apt-get some package on to the mac" / "The initial hurdle to deployment is the hard one" Far easier for the vast majority of users already. Download, move to Applications, done. Automatic updating via Sparkle. It ain't exactly rocket surgery. As far as typical unixy tools, homebrew (http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew) does a pretty fantastic job.
- jacquesm 16y agoI've installed some non-standard packages on the Mac and it was pretty tricky. Not exactly 'move to applications'. And if some package is only available in source you're really in for a rough ride. It's been a while though (about 2 years), possibly it's much easier now than it was then. I use my mac so little now I've borrowed it to a friend here that does design. Too bad in a way because I really like the machine, it's so quiet compared to the pcs I use.
- ptomato 16y agoWell, that's exactly the thing... There's a vast difference between installing some library for a programming language versus an application that John Q. Enduser wants to use. As far as installing things from source that also has improved greatly in the last two years as well, so there's that. But in general I'd say the user experience when installing applications on the mac is certainly miles ahead of the way Windows typically works, and arguably better then even Linux (Ubuntu or similar) with the gui frontend to apt-get.