Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 07:26:49 -0700 From: "Carlos C. Tapang" <ctapang@easystreet.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.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: <002901bdec7e$5d79a6d0$0d787880@apex>
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>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. Thanks for the serious response. I have seen WINE, but could you give me pointers to the other attempts you mentioned? Being a little quixotic sometimes does't hurt. Microsoft is a paper tiger. Do you think they can move the goal posts so drastically that you can't catch up? They can not risk even a few of the gazillion Windows applications from failing to run on their next version. In fact, Windows 98 still runs real-mode apps. And that's the reason it's so ugly. > >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. Your fear of Microsoft is verging on the irrational. Before Microsoft sues a puny outfit, they better consider how their other enemies (including the Justice Department and other unholy alliances such as Ralph Nader's) would react. THEY are afraid of us more than we are afraid of them. They certainly can not fight a "rag-tag" band of talented people, scattered all over the world, building systems as complex as FreeBSD. > >* The fact that Pat Boone has already done this should be seen as > a complete anomaly, sort of like a quantum vacuum fluctuation. > Heroes are, by definition, few and far between. Yes, they are an anomaly. Fear not: the Internet and the bazaar mode of software development are powerful weapons at your disposal. --Carlos To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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