Paul Surgeon wrote:
On Monday 03 October 2005 00:28, Ed Baker wrote:
P.S.
Some people in the Linux/Unix camp tend to look down on MS-Windows users. I
used to be in that camp myself. I've been an active unix user since 1979
and I owned a copy of Slackware linux when it was distributed on 19 three
and one half inch floppies. I'm not a rooky when it comes to working in
Unix. However, I refuse to run Flightgear on a unix box. I'll concede that
Unix/Linux is great ... no doubt about it ... but, as they say two hundred
and twenty five million Beatles fans can't be all wrong. If Flightgear
plans to draw a large audience (and I think it is worthy of it), the
Flightgear community HAS TO REALIZE that they MUST appeal to the MS-Windows
community. That's just the facts ... it's not an opinion, it's not an "us
versus them" scenario. It's just what it is. There's no denying it.
I'm *way* behind on my email here, so I'm not sure why I'm replying to
this first, but ...
For what it's worth, if you look at things like web hits from windows
browsers versus web hits from any other platform, or if you look at the
number of people downloading the windows version versus the number of
people downloading the source code ... it's clear that windows users are
by far and away the dominant portion of our user base.
Every time I see someone mention appealing to windows, or appealing to
the MSFS crowd, I keep thinking back to the old "your appeal is
fruitless" pun, but I can never think of a good clean way to work that in.
I don't personally have time to be full time marketing director and the
project can't afford to hire anyone to be marketing director (or
anything else for that matter), so FlightGear really isn't being
actively marketed to anyone specifically, not unix, not mac, not
windows. When I've been "marketing" FlightGear recently, I've been
pushing it as an "engineering" tool. Notice the recent matlab interface
supported by matlab. I probably see some stuff that not everyone else
sees, but if you don't pick this up from the mailing lists, take it from
me, FlightGear is getting used extensively in the aerospace industry.
FlightGear is being used as part of many different UAV projects, from
simulation to flight computer development to training to real time
visualization ... both in academia and in industry. FlightGear is even
being used as part of product being marketed to people who develop
modern fly by wire jets. Oh, not to mention the guy who plans to add
portions of FlightGear to his FAA Level A certified full motion
simulator. FlightGear is used as part of a number of other simulator
projects that I'm aware of. One simulator recently was setup at a
university in Naples Italy. It's a dual driving/flight simulator.
There's a lot of *really* cool stuff going on. It's not just about
downloading FlightGear and running it on your home computer (windows,
mac, linux, freebsd, etc.) Don't get me wrong, that's one of our
primary target audiences, and most of our developers come from that
world, but FlightGear is so much more than just a home desktop simulator.
Could we do things to make life easier for windows users? Certainly,
but we have been making steady improvements all along as we've gone.
Could we make things easier for linux or mac or sgi or solaris or
freebsd users, yes, and we are working in those directions too.
Sometimes we make changes for one platform that adversely affect another
platform, but that's never intentional. Each platform needs a strong
"defender"! :-) But this all takes time and effort, and we are all
volunteers, and some of this stuff is really hard and really time consuming.
And don't forget, we all bring our own personal preferences and personal
agendas to the project. That's just the way life works in just about
any organization. So individually there may be disparranging comments
once in a while towards "other" platforms. We really need to try to
keep those to a minimum if not eliminate them entirely. But on the flip
side, if you see one of those remarks come scrolling across your screen,
you need to realize that person speaks pretty much just for themselves.
Anyway that is just my 2 cents, speaking mostly on behalf of myself. ;-)
My only issue with windows right now is the crappy video capture app we
have for our live wireless uav footage deletes the movie automatically
if it detects too much "snow". So we don't have footage from our crash
to try to analyze what happened. That was almost two weeks ago now and
I'm still pissed! But I'll stop before I start overly generalizing. :-)
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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