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That works on Windows because Microsoft have made a commitment to doing things that way, as an intentional moat. If you've got $$$$ of CAD software (or whateve

That works on Windows because Microsoft have made a commitment to doing things that way, as an intentional moat. If you've got $$$$ of CAD software (or whatever) in binary form, which you know will work on pretty much every version of Windows but will absolutely not work on Linux or OS X - that's a good reason to stay on Windows. Microsoft is willing to do a bunch of compatibility testing etc to maintain that moat. They've got the money to pay developers to make sure Office 97 still runs on Windows 11. Linux, on the other hand, has a lot of different stakeholders - and some of those stakeholders take the opinion that closed source software can go fuck itself. Maybe a Linux distribution wants to update from OpenSSL 1.1 to OpenSSL 3.0 and they're quite happy to patch all the software that's part of the distro. If you want to run some closed-source binary-only software from 1997 - that's between you and the software vendor, buddy.

badsectoracula 4y ago
> some of those stakeholders take the opinion that closed source software can go fuck itself. It is sadly a very common misconception that backwards compatibility is only for close source software but in reality FLOSS benefit a ton from backwards compatibility too. Imagine for example if glibc decided to add a third parameter to fopen (ignore if it is realistic for glibc to do that, this is for the sake of argument). The only benefit of FLOSS[0] would be that it'd be easier for someone to update it to use the third parameter instead of waiting for the original developer to do so - but still every program, FLOSS or not, would need to be updated anyway and someone would need to spend time doing that update. A more realistic example would be GIMP: the stable releases (last was made a few weeks ago) still rely on Gtk2 and the Gtk3 port (i.e. the effort to move from Gtk2 to Gtk3) is still in beta while the Gtk devs consider it deprecated. And this is all open source, no closed source software in sight, yet see how much time was lost (not only for GIMP but for any software that relied on Gtk2 and had to switch to Gtk3, with the story repeating for Gtk4) - time that could have spent improving the actual functionality that the GIMP users use the program for - adding functionality for manipulating images - instead of using yet another approach to draw and lay out buttons, menus and checkboxes - something that was already solved back in Gtk 1.x days. [0] actually of any source available that doesn't have a "see but don't touch" rule

badsectoracula 4y ago

> some of those stakeholders take the opinion that closed source software can go fuck itself. It is sadly a very common misconception that backwards compatibility is only for close source software but in reality FLOSS benefit a ton from backwards compatibility too. Imagine for example if glibc decided to add a third parameter to fopen (ignore if it is realistic for glibc to do that, this is for the sake of argument). The only benefit of FLOSS[0] would be that it'd be easier for someone to update it to use the third parameter instead of waiting for the original developer to do so - but still every program, FLOSS or not, would need to be updated anyway and someone would need to spend time doing that update. A more realistic example would be GIMP: the stable releases (last was made a few weeks ago) still rely on Gtk2 and the Gtk3 port (i.e. the effort to move from Gtk2 to Gtk3) is still in beta while the Gtk devs consider it deprecated. And this is all open source, no closed source software in sight, yet see how much time was lost (not only for GIMP but for any software that relied on Gtk2 and had to switch to Gtk3, with the story repeating for Gtk4) - time that could have spent improving the actual functionality that the GIMP users use the program for - adding functionality for manipulating images - instead of using yet another approach to draw and lay out buttons, menus and checkboxes - something that was already solved back in Gtk 1.x days. [0] actually of any source available that doesn't have a "see but don't touch" rule