Update: It has been suggested that it is not productive or collaborative to talk negatively about some developers releasing software for unixy operating systems without really trying to integrate it with the versions of widely deployed software available in those operating systems.
It is a fair point. It’s not productive or collaborative. It may be true, but ranting about it doesn’t help anyone but me.
More productive and collaborative would be to nicely ask these ISVs to establish a less isolated packaging process with our communities and companies (but I don’t mean LSB or a new package format). Clearly some people won’t work with them on ethical grounds, but a more pragmatic position will accept that commercial software exists, so it might as well not make our lives unnecessarily hard. And the companies shifting Linux are hot on ISVs.
Jorge: No, I don’t like having multiple JVMs, but I have been in corporate situations before where it has been necessary because specific applications have required different versions :(
What, you don’t like 56 different JVMs in /opt?