[weblacky]

Not to repeat myself (but, and as is well known hereabout, (because there's nothing I more prefer than repeat myself)), but I use my Octane2 for exactly two things (neither of which you could/can buy the equivalent of, today, for less than 25,000 US), Pro/ENGINEER and OpenGL. Well, okay, OpenGL is now open source, but really no one uses it for anything that's not commercial, for which they pay stupid MS fast fortunes.

Sorry I must've missed something. What does Microsoft have to do with the above statement? I mean Microsoft still supports OpenGL unlike Apple.  So that's a good thing right? I'm not even sure if Apple officially supports Vulcan but I know there's an effort to get it on there.  DirectX is more holistically designed towards building video games because it covers other aspects as well. I'm certainly not going to knock it. And I'm certainly happy that OpenGL is still OK and functioning just fine on the latest version of Windows.

And to be fair I don't even know what a software license like that cost anymore. I mean are we talking $6000 are we talking $20,000? At what point is the software more expensive than the station?

I mean from my understanding, the point of OpenGL is that chance at cross platform graphics acceleration and standard three-dimensional world manipulation. Companies that aren't building games are definitely smarter to use OpenGL or attempt to Vulcan instead of a platform specific API like METAL or DirectX because they're going have at least 2 to 3 potential platform targets that they can port their software too.  Better investment I would say.  Unless you need super fancy effects that either one of those does out of the box then to shortcut yourself maybe that turns the tides.

I'm not saying Microsoft does everything right but I will give them enormous credit for recognizing one and very important point of computing in the real world. Application binary compatibility. Who else does that? Go on let me know. We've almost come full circle with this platform lock in stuff and now it's gotten worse that a several of open standards have been retired in view of new closed standards being developed for each operating system. Today's OSes have never been more divergent, they may still have vestiges of common ancestry you can run on them. But how much of that can build an actual graphical program? I think Java at least tried with swing to have the right idea of giving some basic controls and windowing instructions to a platform diagnostic source base that allowed for basic utilities and applications to try to make it cross platform without having to use the different languages and different control mechanisms to produce what we would consider to be a very basic and crude graphical interface.

I'm not a fan of Java I'm just saying that was one lofty goal that I at least admired. Nobody else is really tried that and I think as of civilization there's too much wasted energy and wasted man hours redesigning the wheel every single day just to get an interface that looks like everyone else's. Maybe it's considered a ride of passage by some but I think we have more important things to do and we really need to have a publicly funded set of reusable components that companies and individuals can just use to get us past the 101 level of programming and into the 201 level of programming.  

There are tool kits to help you, that's not like I'm blind, but that's a group's hard work without the support of the major manufacturers of these platforms. I realize they have their own vested interest with their own tools that lock you in. But I would say the strength to me would be telling me that you're easy to use, not gonna crash a bunch, and you can run my old software with little to minimal alterations. To me that's a sale to get me on board with your operating system.

And to be fair that's why Microsoft is still king because if I was running a business I'd sure as hell write my business software for Microsoft.  Because I don't know next week, next year, next decade if I'll be even able to run my program on MacOS or Linux even with the source code and just hitting recompile.