Crivens said:
The problem for Microsoft is that they are between a hammer and a hard place.
Agreed. They have what is a clunky old architecture in many areas, but many of their customers are only customers due to backwards compatibility and application support / upgrade path.
Do they do it to improve the software or are there other reasons?
Being a company with the goal to maximize profit, I can not see that they do it for the best of humanity.
Of course profit is a motivating factor. But they also need to release something "good enough" to prevent defection and the market is not standing still.
The fact that Windows 8 is bombing so badly shows that even Microsoft are vulnerable to a truly crappy product release.
(hope you don't mean me here
)
It is said that the engineers do not know what language they will write their programms in in 10 years, they only know it will be called Fortran*.
The same goes for radical changes in Unix, or everywhere else. Change too much, and it stops being what it was. You may still call it what it once was, but that does not mean it still
is.
Nah, no one in particular. But every time Wayland comes up, whether it's here, or Slashdot or wherever you have a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over it, about how it's going to kill remote GUI applications, etc. "We'll lose rootless apps!", etc.
Never mind that other platforms, even Windows with RDP or ICA have been doing exactly that (rootless remote applications) for over a decade now - with
far better WAN performance, to boot.
Sometimes, changing something to no longer resemble what it was is a good thing.
X11 is a prime example in my opinion. Yes, it mostly works. Yes, people have done cool stuff with it. But, the core architecture is so badly layered that anyone writing for X is probably going to spend more time working around its brain damage / baggage than actually developing their app.
Configuration files are another example - virtually every app makes up its own configuration file format. Whether it's XML, simple key=value in a plain text file or whatever, the lack of a standard means if you want to write tools to process this stuff you need a million different parsers to deal with the different apps that people install.
Just because it's the status quo, doesn't mean it's good.
I'm not saying change for change's sake. But in some respects (mostly in terms of interface), the free Unix world is worse than Microsoft for refusing to evolve.
But yeah... somewhat drifted off topic there.
Short term advantages of FreeBSD vs. Windows 2012 server: reduced resource requirements, ability to configure everything without the GUI, for every app.
Long term advantages: you have the source. If FreeBSD drop support, you can fork/support it yourself internally.