On Feb 9, 2005, at 12:07 AM, Roger Binns wrote:
This is a very valid point, but since when has that really mattered to people writing open source software? Windows certainly doesn't seem to have more support from the open source community than anything else.
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=418
Yeah, exactly. There's not even twice as many Windows projects as Mac OS X projects, and far more Linux projects that Windows projects. These numbers aren't very good anyway, NetBSD's pkgsrc has over 5300 packages, and there are 204 marked NetBSD on sourceforge!
As a counter-point, deploying software on Mac OS X is cheap and fast. You save god knows how much time and money in development and testing (especially testing), so you have much higher profit margins.
It doesn't matter how cheap and fast it is for 5% of the market.
Sure it does, if you release OS X first it can fund Windows development and testing. Worked fine for us.
If you look at open source graphical toolkits that support at least
two platforms, you won't find any that started on the Mac. These
are the ones I know of that can be used from Python and where they started.
- QT (Unix) - GTK (Unix) - wxWidgets (Windows) - Tk (Unix) - Fltk (Unix) - Fox (Unix)
Consequently the Mac versions of these (if supported at all) is often not as good as the original platform. That results in a bit of a chicken and egg problem. There is no/little Mac support by other developers because the toolkits are poor, and the toolkits don't improve because noone uses them.
I think we're probably going to have real GNUStep support for PyObjC sometime in the next few months.. though I'm not sure whether the NeXT roots count as Mac or not.
Fortunately it just takes some sustained efforts, even just bug reporting
and things get better. wxWidgets has gotten a lot better although there
are still holes.
For the OP, one choice is to try and help improve a toolkit at the same time as doing their own project. It will end up improving things for many more developers and users.
That's definitely an option with any open source dependency :)
-bob
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