I love the notion of “vendor lock in”. This site was briefly hosted on an SVN repository at Joyent. I then moved it to a Mercurial respoitory on Kiln. Then recently moved it to Bitbucket.

Three companies and two version control systems; What vendor lock in?

Only idiots concern themselves with “what if” situations regarding vendor lock in, because only idiots don’t have a strategy for it. The FOSS crowd are idiots because their solution is to simply lock into poor open source offerings and call it freedom.

BTW, I was looking for some materials to educate myself on the subject of RTOS. At a certain point I arrived at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_operating_systems

Please note the pretty picture on the right. In a true moronix, pardon me, Phoronix fashion, Im gonna make some arbitrary (albeit not untrue) statements:

- given the 5% usage share of mobile OSes, I would say desktop is still relevant (no way). – Given that iOS has more usage share than GNU Linux and Android Linux (WHY IS IT NOT GNU/Android!!!111eins1elf), we could safely conclude that Linux sucks ass (cheap knock offs of iOS too).

Yeah, SurveyMonkeySays™ kicks ass.

P.S. Oh, and imagine the 1.11% loonix share of the graph fragmented between more than 100 distros, fighting among each others and reinventing the wheel – way to progress, guys.

LOL, the best thing about the Comparison_of_operating_system wiki is it’s discussion page. I found the following gem there:

Windows is not really an operating system, but a window manager. It should be compared to KDE or GNOME. Every other OS in this list does more than controlling access to the disks and relying on third-party software to do the rest.

Are they kidding me, Wikipedia? Are they still talking about Windows being built atop DOS in 2011? Maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were referring to Windows 1.0-3.11 and Window 9x only. If they really think the NTs (and by extension, every version of Windows released in the 21th century) are based on DOS somehow, there is no hope for any of their technical articles.

Well, I was there to see a list of OSes (I guess they could at least get that right), but the funny picture to the right got my attention. When I got the list I needed it was google from that point on.

... actually I was just pointing out that if you were going to run a serious survey about software deployment practices, SurveyMonkey is a pretty chintzy and unprofessional way of doing it.

“We need to talk to industry leaders about open source deployments!”
“I know, let’s use the same tool 14-year-old girls use to ask whether Edward or Jacob is more dreamy!”

Seriously, spend the $20 and get a branded survey.

@YouAgain:
>Windows is not really an operating system, but a window manager. It should be compared to KDE or GNOME. Every other OS in this list does more than controlling access to the disks and relying on third-party software to do the rest.

That’s entirely backwards.

One of the strategies of making Linux look good is to make use of the ambiguity of the word— people use it to mean both the kernel and the full OS stack. There’s no way to do a fair comparison between “Windows 7” and “Linux” because the Linux experience is vastly different depending on distro— and you can cherry-pick whatever distro has the Windows-killing feature.

The only fair comparison would be “Windows 7” vs. “Ubuntu default install”. But nobody would do that comparison, because Ubuntu would come out looking pretty crappy.

In other words, if you’re going to use “Windows 7”, which is a complete OS stack, on one side of your comparison chart, you need to have a complete OS stack on the other as well.

@FIBBERMCGEE: Windows 9X wasn’t “built atop DOS”, unless you consider “uses DOS as a bootloader” as the same thing.

By that logic, Linux is “built atop GRUB.”

Well, you can also point out that by the time 386 Enhanced Mode became supported, Windows (3x and so) did enough of its own housekeeping that it was an OS in its own right. I was being magnanimous and giving them the most benefit of the doubt. Though that is probably a mistake because those comparison articles are magnets for the ignorant zealots who want to spin the article to put Linux in the best light (or have fights over GNU or GNU-less), firm in their knowledge that Linux is superior to what they know of Windows from 1989.

In a sense, Linux is built on top of Grub. Which is of course built on top of a real Operating System, ie BIOS. But Grub was intended to be so much more than just a boot-loader, as you can see from the insane amount of functionality they tried (and failed) to cram into Grub2.

As you point out, it’s practically impossible to make a sensible comparison, these days. At least with the original AT&T 64KB or whatever, you could map out the basic building blocks and compare them to any other 64KB OS — and there were a lot of those.

Any quote that claims that NT is “DOS based” (or as you say 95 was DOS based” is good for a face-palm and nothing else. It instantly destroys the credibility of whoever comes out with it.

Admin continually bangs on about this, but he is of course right. There are only two questions you should ask of a desktop Operating System:

(1) How easy is it for a non-technical user to navigate around it?
(2) How easy is it to build a useful application (for some definition of useful) on top of it?

Everything else is just propeller-headed nonsense.

LOL @ “Windows is just a shell”. The nearest comparison to GNOME or KDE is Windows Explorer! Not the whole OS.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_operating_systems

I’m wondering what moron has put Microkernel for AmigaOS Classic. That thing didn’t even have isolated address spaces. EVERYTHING has been executed in a single address space. Raw pointers as “object handles”. It even had very “convenient” standard (and unrestricted) way to patch standard libraries (http://www.bing.com/search?q=exec.library+SetFunction) which means it was DESIGNED to work in a single address space.

To be fair, it had real (preemptive) multitasking (unlike most other OSes of that time including MacOS Classic which survived into 21st century), it had real asynchronous I/O (thing that Linux still can’t do right) and lots of other cool stuff – but definitely not microkernel.