Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote: >Hello,
>On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Mohan Sundaram wrote: >> I'd written a mail on this earlier in a thread where NASSCOM rejecting >> FOSS standards was discussed. I see the reasons as being less >> sociological than pragmatic. My views are as under: >The reasons you have given are reasonable for: > (a) Organisations/people who were newbies in the 90's > (b) Business organisations/people (who _must_ follow the market). >This still does not explain why the organisations that had competence >in Unix allowed this competence to lapse (for example, by "forgetting" >to pass it on to the younger generation). Moreover, it looks like >academic organisations are following business trends rather than >leading businesses to future trends. A few things that happened in the 80s and the 90s that have contributed to the current state: 1. Good UNIX programmers have always been far more expensive to recruit, train and keep. 2. Oracle forms 4 came out and there was a shift away from terminals to desktop environment. Simultaneously GUI tools such as Visual Basic became very popular. For C++ development, companies preferred Visual C++. This was the point when our students went from being command line warriors to mouse clickers. There was no longer a need to be competent in UNIX - one could easily land a job in VB/VC etc. So the number of UNIX programmers dropped heavily. This made the situation mentioned in point 1 even more acute. 3. The specialist UNIX platforms such as SGI Irix, HP UX, SCO etc all met their demise when the UNIX workstations started getting replaced by Intergraph or other workstations running Windows NT 3.5/4. It was now possible to setup entire render farms, do computer aided design and also do scientific computing calculations without leaving the GUI. Most UNIX application vendors ported their apps over to work on Windows NT around this time. So the market for UNIX programmers dropped yet again. As a result of this, the domain that UNIX occupied was restricted to verticals such as telecom (where it is still pretty dominant), niche scientific computing, mainframes (for very large corps) etc. It is now over the past few years that UNIX (or rather Linux) is seeing a resurgence primarily because of the cost advantages of Linux. But I am very doubtful that UNIX would reach the heights that it reached during the 1970s and the early 80s. NASSCOM's board has people from non-programming and non-computer engineering backgrounds. Even those who are from computer backgrounds probably cut their teeth on MS software and not on UNIX. Many of them probably still have the image of UNIX as blinking green terminals. Therefore I am not surprised that they have a low opinion of UNIX/Linux and are pushing MS's case... with some encouragement from MS (of course). Thanks, Prem _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
