Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 18:29:07 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, root@dihelix.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Quake's out, where's that Linux ELF emulation? Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960228181947.25940B-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <4632.825559161@time.cdrom.com>
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On Wed, 28 Feb 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > Picture, if you will, a UNIX consultant talking to the product manager > for Foobolix at Foonetics, Inc: > > "You say you want to support this product on ``UNIX''? Ah... OK, > go get ahold of some Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, SCO and OSF/1 machines > (plus maybe a SunOS partition for the hold-outs), hire at least 3 > engineers and prepare to spend 3-6 months at it. Oh yeah, you'll > also need to keep the machines around more or less indefinitely > for ongoing support." > > [a strangling noise is heard over the phone] > > "Hello? Are you OK? Yes, I do admit that this is 6 times the effort > for a market perhaps 1/100th the size of Windows.. No, it doesn't make > any sense, I agree. Excuse me? No, I'm afraid that the free UNIX market > isn't in much better shape. There are at least 3 different variants for the > Intel architecture alone, and each has its own distinct ABI." > > [mumble mumble gritch sigh] > > "Yes, in their father's footsteps as it were. Those that have fathers, > yes. You're quite astute, sir. Perhaps we should move on to discuss the > NT version of your product?" LOL!! Ain't that the truth! As I just finished posting to Terry, I would rather have a Linux version, even unsupported, than no version at all... Let's scale that hypothetical conversation down.. Suppose I have a killer idea for a small app that I want to write in my garage and market as shareware. Well for Windows that is quite possible, hell I could probably whip out a couple in Visual Basic before breakfast! :-) And you can always find a market on the Web, and you can expect that maybe 5% of the people who use your program will pay the shareware fee, and 5% of millions of people is enough to make a decent living. Now let's try this with Unix! First of all, you have to give out the source code, so whatever "Pay the shareware fee" mechanisms you put will just be commented out in short notice, i.e. #define REGISTERED.. But suppose you have some killer source code that you don't want people to look through (and steal). You can distribute it as a binary, but then you need, as you mentioned, a Sun, a SGI, AIX, HP-UX, in other words $100,000 worth of workstations, just to COMPILE the damn thing, so for the small-time vendor that is out of the picture. Otherwise you can try to "obscure" the source code with some sort of variable-mangling Perl script, but that isn't too secure, and if you're including "patented" code, would not be acceptable (case in point, the Cinepak and Indeo codecs in the XAnim movie player, which the author distributes in ".o" form to link with the rest of the source, and generated most of them using GCC cross-compilers on his Sun). Anyway, if the UNIX community collectively swallowed their pride and decided what would give them the most applications, the OSF would buy out TWIN and declare Win32 the standard Unix ABI! One can only hope.. :-) ---Jake
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