zoco wrote:Factories. Control of machines with which products within NEN specifications have to be produced.
I actually seen plenty of Industrial Computers running quality control software on Linux operating systems in my professional life, right at the production line. And I mean high volume production, thousands of units a day.
I guess it does depend on the industry. I work in the consumer audio products industry, and I worked alongside big companies too. We haven't seen any of the requirements you list.
Again, in my field, I have been in contact with people that work in audio for automotive (noise cancellation and suppression) and all embedded audio processing uses Linux as a base, to the point that algorithms are often implemented as ALSA plugins.
Not to mention inflight entertainment systems, which nowadays are all based on Android, with a server on the aeroplane normally running some Linux. I routinely test how well USB headphones work with ALSA as part of my job, and flag issues to firmware developers.
I typically use open source tools and program for data analysis and numerical simulation within my field. I made a list of packages, a fair bit of which I use, on my blog:
https://thecrocoduckspond.wordpress.com ... -software/. I do maintain few Linux based workstations in my office.
I think most of the examples you mention are about standardization: when more entities need to cooperate on a specific project and/or need to receive some kind of certification and/or produce some kind of official document, then they need to adhere to a standard which requires certain software, as you say.
However, there is also the other face of standardization, which is the use of common software utilities, APIs, standards and toolkits to integrate various pieces of technology. One example would be MPI: the bread and butter of scientific cluster computing (which is mostly open source stuff).
I would say I can make many examples about Linux dominating in certain fields. Scientific computing is clearly one of them (al major scientific experiments run on Linux clusters, and all major scientific software tools are open source). Artificial Intelligence is clearly one of them (all major AI tookits and cloud computing tools are open source). Cloud computing is dominated by Linux and BSD. Realtime industrial computers run Linux-rt very often (this is why my university had a course on Linux-rt based OSes), and many 3D blockbuster movies are rendered on Linux clusters. You mention Autodesk (the makers of Autocad): Maya by Autodesk has a Linux version. As far as I know, one of the main reasons is that cluster computing, practically speaking, can be only based on Linux (or BSD, perhaps). If you need to render animated movies you need clusters, and hence you need Linux support. And hence they offer Linux support.
Given that we can find many examples and counterexamples, I would say that it perhaps depend on the industry one works in and with what kind of standardization and official certifications are required within the industry. For example, who knows what the Military does... In the industry I work in, I haven't came across anything like that yet. In fact, I routinely use open source stuff (in agreement and limitation to what prescribed by the open source licenses). For this reason, I do not think there are the means to make a blanket statement about how de-facto the world mandates Windows: in many realms and industries I see proprietary stuff dominating, in others I see open source dominating.
Also, I believe it is OK for developers to choose what platform they want to develop for. I mean, I think it would be unfair to force every developer to develop for every OS, as that would mean:
- Linux
- Mac OS
- Windows
- Menuet OS
- Minix
- FreeBSD and various derivatives
- Haiku OS
- RISC OS
The list could go on, but that is already too long for anybody in the world.
As a note:
zoco wrote:True or not? Ask someone you know working with these kind of high level contracts with the big companies. You need to go beyond the regular ceo of a common company in your town.
Go ask some company who delivers parts for the car industry. There are huge requirements you for sure can't work within with linux.
I detect a somewhat smug tone in there. If so, please calm down: if someone asks for examples it is not to imply that he believe you know nothing, or that you are lying, or something like that. It most likely just means that he is interested, and he wants to hear more. By providing more info, it all becomes clearer and everybody reading becomes smarter in the process.
So, to take it from here and going back on topic, could it be that standardization within the audio industry is forcing many recording labels to not use open source at all (and hence most records of most artists are produced with little to no open source)?