Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 23:32:04 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Carlos C. Tapang" <ctapang@easystreet.com> Cc: "John Birrell" <jb@cimlogic.com.au>, "Greg Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What would it take to build the FreeBSD kernel into Portable Executable (PE) format? Message-ID: <20291.907137124@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 29 Sep 1998 22:44:25 PDT." <004901bdec35$62d17d40$0d787880@apex>
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> Funny. Probably more than 90% of the x86 world runs Windows. FreeBSD is a > very good system, but not even 1% of the machines worldwide run it. All I > want to do is make what's good in FreeBSD more acceptable to 90% of the > world. FreeBSD dressed up as Windows has a better chance of conquering the > desktop than FreeBSD by itself. You probably do not want to target the > desktop, but that's where the real battle is going on. Linux is not the > enemy, the enemy is much bigger: Windows; and your only chance of even > touching Windows is to look like it. Heh. Speaking seriously for a second, your odds of actually succeeding at this are roughly 1,323,430,499,213 to one (essentially equivalent to the odds of Donny Osmond resurrecting his singing career as a heavy metal rock star*). Not only is the problem a rather difficult one (and see WINE, Freedows, TWIN and the corpses of several even more well funded attempts for evidence of this) but even if you somehow got close through an act of sheer will and personal brilliance, Microsoft would just move the goal posts on you every 3 months or so and spike your efforts. They've done it before (to IBM and others) and they can do it again. Microsoft doesn't WANT competition from Windows at this level and the ultimate accolade you could hope for, if you really did somehow overcome all the technical hurdles and icky, messy, ugly evilness necessary to truly emulating Windows95 enough to run all those Win32 applications (Office97 being the grail you seek), would be to get your ass sued off by Microsoft. Like I said. "Good luck" :-) - Jordan * The fact that Pat Boone has already done this should be seen as a complete anomaly, sort of like a quantum vacuum fluctuation. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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