Quote: Original post by dave j
You're upset that your government wants to save money by not giving big chunks of it to a foreign company? [smile]

I'm upset that 'my' government (unfortunately) decides to invest into a product with subpar quality, especially in a security relevant sector such as law enforcement. Using an OSS system such as Linux is a significant security risk. All the source code needs to be independently audited and checked for backdoors added by some random OSS contributor sometime in the past. There is no accountability whatsoever for the content of the source. There is no company the government could sue if something goes wrong. I also expect significant follow up costs for specialized support and customized software development (which might already be available for Windows).

So yeah, I would indeed prefer that 'my' government spends my taxpayer money on quality software from a reputable foreign company, rather than publicly endorsing something related to that thing.

Oh jeez, now you've done it.

Hmm.

There's a middle ground. In fact, it appears that the middle ground is what the Gendarmerie Nationale has chosen: deployment of open source software with in-house support. It's not free; that in-house support means salaries, tools, training, etc. However, it is cheaper for select organizations and individuals with select uses.

If your organization is dependent on critical third-party software that runs on the desktop and is currently only available for Windows, guess what? You're buying Windows boxes. No other option is as effective. If, however, your organization primarily employs web-based applications that are accessible through the browser, with only minimal office document needs, then Linux and Open Office become a viable alternative.

Will Linux "rule the desktop"? Probably never. Is Linux "right for gaming, or game development"? No. Linux is barely right for desktop software development, between X Window and the variety of window managers and desktop environments - and programming for them is more painful than using them. But Windows is not perfect for every situation, and if an organization can gain greater control of its own platform, reduce a portion of its hardware TCO and embrace and/or contribute to open standards and technology that citizens can take advantage of, that's awesome.

I sometimes feel that government-developed software that is not sensitive to national security should be in a national public domain: it's funded by the taxes of the citizens, so they should be able to leverage it in their own initiatives. And there's quite a bit of the stuff that is made available, though data more frequently than code - GOS, for instance. (DADS is a code example.)

The extremes are boring. Nothing new is learned from them - I get it, RMS is a nut, GNUtards want to kill the software development ecosystem (hmm, does that make commercial software developers the horse-drawn buggy builders to the Free Software community's automakers?), Linux is a duct-taped piece of shit; "Windoze" is a vulnerable anchor retarding progress, propped by the monopoly enjoyed by its parent, "Micro$oft," blah blah. There is a middle ground, where a mix of commercial and free, proprietary and open source tools can be used to serve the only group that matters: the users.

I may no longer use Linux every day, but I'm pleased as hell that it exists. No OS is perfect, and eventually all OSes will be reduced to commodity - value-add. At that point, in the absence of a vendor of something else with incentive to continue developing the OS in order to differentiate its products (see: Apple), only non-proprietary operating systems will continue to thrive. Linux may not work for you right now, but in the future you may be very happy that it was there as a repository of near-current technologies.

Quote: Original post by Promit
Oh jeez, now you've done it.

[lol]

Anyway, is this a thread to discuss Linux in game development, Linux in general, or Linux for the French police? All three?

I used various flavours of Linux as a grad student, and very soon I'm going to install a version of Debian on an old PC to test a new website I'm going to roll out. I've found it's a nice system to tinker around with if you're a programmer, especially one who likes the power to completely modify the system. Unfortunately I'm more than just a programmer, and even the programmer in me prefers my OS to just work so I can do other things. I've also found Linux and Linux apps to fall short on documentation and usability.

I'm also debating with myself whether Linux is a platform worth supporting as a game developer. All the games I make must run on Windows and Mac OS X, so having cross platform architecture is a requirement. But even then, I don't know if the Linux market is big enough to worth developing for. The figures I've seen for indie games that aim for Windows, Mac and Linux release suggest that Linux sales only account for 5%. When I factor in the extra development and support costs, hassles like testing under multiple OSes (Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, Red Hat, etc.) and GUIs (GNOME and KDE at least), I'm not sure it's worth it. The impression I get is that Linux users are either uninterested in games, have Windows for games, or are extremely into the whole Free Software thing; not really that lucrative a market.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry

Quote:
3) I developed on ATI hardware using OpenGL for years with little/no problems. The majority of the code path was fine and in some regards they conformed better than NV in some areas.

hmk. I hope Yann joins here, he was complaining about ATI quite a lot.
From top of my head, on ATI, glReadPixels still silently does BGR rather than RGB in some cases. Also, I had to fiddle with command order on multiple occasions (not having ATI card, it is kind of difficult to fix any issues).

Yann isn't the only one who has a bone to pick :) I tried developing on ATI hardware using OpenGL for a few months and was utterly shocked and awed at how horrible the drivers were. There were so many bugs it was surprising that I managed to finished all my assignments for my graphics class at all, let alone on time and in full working order. I won't go into details here since I've discussed it at length in other threads (as has Yann, often in the same thread).

Granted that was about two years ago, and from what I've heard ATI has vastly improved their OpenGL support. So at the present time, OpenGL on ATI hardware could be excellent. But it most certainly was not last I used it, and the experience has scared me away from OpenGL for the time being, until someone comes along and pays me to start using it again :)

Quote: Original post by Kambiz
For everyone that does not care about games Ubuntu is a great choice.

Ive heard this a million times about (all versions of?) Linux. My question is, WHY is this the case? Linux obviously has a huge fanbase of developers. Some of them must also like games. A lot of them dont like Microsoft, and a lot of them would like to see Linux overtake Windows as the most popular operating system. Everyone knows that "Linux is great...unless you like games."

So WHAT is the missing piece of the puzzle? Based on all of the above, Linux should have MORE games than Windows.

Quote: Original post by Toolmaker

Quote: (i sure hope they dont just pirate windoze)

Alright, you basically just disqualified yourself from a normal discussion. Don't go around and bash things. You don't hear me go 'L00nix'.

So? When its pirated, its certainly "windoze" [smile]
(on govt level, by pirating I mean making up some law so that its even legal for govt, or pushing at microsoft to make it free for govt, or that kind of thing. I doubt they could do that though, they're not spending their own money)

Quote:

Quote:
b: all the forms are published as .doc files, which would've been illegal advertising of microsoft if not implicit assumption that everyone pirates microsoft word.

Why should it be illegal? By the lack of any standard

open document been here for a while. (dunno if microsoft word supports it though. microsoft doesnt like to support standards evidently theres open-source addon for loading/saving odt by now)

Imagine that your government would pick up a standard on secret-formula pen ink which is properly supported by precisely 1 company, and require everyone to use such pens? That would hundred percent lead to investigation whenever such decision was justified.

I would agree that when the decision was made, there was no format with much more widespread support than .doc . But times change, and today there is. I'm pretty sure that eventually, governments in europe will be switching to odt , with my government being nearly last (when other governments start complaining). Will take a long while.

Actually, i just have a gripe about having to fix up horrible formatting in forms (that i'm filling for relatives or for myself sometimes), which displays incorrectly in OO (and likely, even in microsoft word of different versions).

[Edited by - Dmytry on March 16, 2009 1:51:22 AM]

Quote: Original post by Trapper ZoidI'm also debating with myself whether Linux is a platform worth supporting as a game developer.

Maybe it's not so lucrative as Mac OS X, but check this out:

Quote: World of Goo Linux Version is Ready!
Update 4: It’s only been 2 days since the release of the Linux version and it already accounts for 4.6% of the full downloads from our website. Our thanks to everyone who’s playing the game on Linux and spreading the word. Here are a couple of nifty stats:
[...]
# More copies of the game were sold via our website on the day the Linux version released than any other day. This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all :)

That's pretty awesome, if you ask me.

If you are an indie developer, aiming for cross-platform distribution (Windows / Mac OS X), Linux support should be trivial to add. If your application is Windows-only (which is not terribly brilliant for an indie developer, but to each his own), you can link against winelib and make sure it runs (more or less).

Quote: Original post by Yann L
I'm upset that 'my' government (unfortunately) decides to invest into a product with subpar quality, especially in a security relevant sector such as law enforcement.

Have you made an actual cost-benefit analysis on quality, security and cost, or are you basing this on your personal preferences?

It's not as if your government geek said, "Gee, Micro$oft sucks let's install Linux!" - yet you treat it like that. The "subpar security" comment is especially hilarious, given that 66.6% of the internet is powered by Apache running on various flavours of Unix.

Quote: Using an OSS system such as Linux is a significant security risk. All the source code needs to be independently audited and checked for backdoors added by some random OSS contributor sometime in the past. There is no accountability whatsoever for the content of the source. There is no company the government could sue if something goes wrong.

Correct, the code should be audited. Which is exactly why Windows is *not* suitable for the government, don't you see? Accountability means nothing after the fact ("a third party may be able to access my data, but I can sue Microsoft so it's ok?")

In any case, I'll let it rest. My feeling is that your government did the right thing.

[Edited by - Fiddler on March 16, 2009 3:46:29 AM]

On accountability of closed source software... read the windows EULA (or any other EULA for that matter). In essence, Microsoft explicitly denies accountability, and tells you not to buy and install the software if you disagree and want accountability for damages.

Quote: Original post by Fiddler
If you are an indie developer, aiming for cross-platform distribution (Windows / Mac OS X), Linux support should be trivial to add.

It's the testing and support that makes me uneasy. It's tricky enough as is. For Windows, you need to check Vista and XP as a minimum, Win.7 soon, maybe some of the earlier ones. For Mac, it's somewhat expected people upgrade (although I can scrounge enough systems to test Panther, Tiger and Leopard if need be). But with Linux, there's a jillion different distros, each with multiple front end windowing systems. That freaks me out.

There's also the problem that I've never got OpenGL to work properly under Linux, although I might just be having bad luck with my choice of hardware.