Comment by wfjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wfjackson | Hacker News Reader

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>The brightest minds aren't programming on Microsoft platforms if you look at colleges and conferences worldwide. This cannot be reversed; Open Source products are now technically superior, the community is very well organized, and it is free.

All I see at colleges and conferences worldwide are Macbooks. How is OS X Open Source? It actually seems to be worse, since it's legally tied to expensive hardware.

Also, Open Source products aren't really technically superior for a number of categories. I am sorry but Photoshop, Office, Exchange etc. are definitely technically superior. Software like Windows Server and SQL Server are competing with free products and still doing very well.

Imagine how much marketshare they would have if they were free of cost and MySQL/PostgresSQL and Linux cost the same as SQL Server and Windows Server now. How many would buy them instead of the free MS products? How many would pay the same as Office costs now for OpenOffice if Office was free? How is this technically superior?

Also, Azure runs Linux and other open source products quite well.

>All I see at colleges and conferences worldwide are Macbooks.

I know anecdotal evidence does not equal real data, but I'm a sophomore/junior (switched majors) in college and I prefer to use Linux over OS X or Windows.

Also, IMO open source products are usually better than their closed source counterparts. I know what is actually running on my computer. I can alter the program how I need. Everyone who contributed to the project did so out of their own enjoyment. Being open source means experts in different fields can make the product better, safer, further optimized.

Gimp does the job for me, I personally use Google Docs because I switch computers a lot. Microsoft Office is just as bad LibreOffice in terms of usability, so I wouldn't call either superior. Don't quote me on this, but I'm sure lots of technically superior closed source products are developed with the help of open source software.

If Linux came at the cost of SQL Server... that's a weird question. How does something open come at cost to the consumer? I can see donations being greatly appreciated, but not required payment. There's to many rabbit holes I could go down here.

But I could be completely wrong, I'm just a 20 yr old dude trying to figure out if Computer Science is even the right degree for me.

OS X provides a user friendly interface on top of a unix like system. It's easy to develop for linux and unix-like systems in general on OS X. Not so much on Windows. Also, we like bash/zsh, and PowerShell doesn't appeal to many of us. Many of us also don't see much of a difference between running a Linux distribution and running OS X, other than the desktop user interface. The differences in the underlying layer get blurry. With Windows, no.

PowerShell isn't the only option available for Windows. You can install Cygwin or other alternatives and have your bash and linux-y environment on Windows.

True. But if you spend most of your time in and around cygwin, it makes sense to switch to some kind of Unix -- while cygwin is marvelous, the nearly perfect Posix layer comes with a non-trivial performance cost - e.g., fork() is horribly slow in cygwin, as are many forms of I/O.

> How is OS X Open Source?

It isn't, but a lot of people develop on open source environments running on OS X. E.g. Python/Django. Because OS X is a Unix, moving between it and Linux for web development is easy.

> Azure runs Linux and other open source products quite well

This may be the case, but there is the perception (possibly an unfounded one; I've never used Azure) that Linux will always be a second-class citizen on Azure.

Not easy enough apparently, as there seems to be a concerted effort to clone OSX on top of Linux these days...

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