🚀 go-pugleaf

mmalcolm Crawford <m.crawford@dcs.shef.ac.uk> wrote:

> OK, so I exaggerate, but it's not clear to me how Unix will
> survive if it doesn't unite behind *something* in order to try
> to deliver on some of the promises of "Open systems" made a couple
> of years ago, and the best something that there is is NEXTSTEP,
> and fortunately it's in almost all the right places(*).  Now if
> only SGI would accept a port to their hardware (if only to keep
> Cambridge Animation happy! :-)

> (*) NeXT is placing bets on M$ too, though, as I mentioned above
> (OpenStep Window$95/NT)... this makes it a bit of a double-edged
> sword as far as the Unix manufacturers go, albeit a very sharp
> one!

That is not a double-edged sword.  One of the biggest advantages
of OpenStep for *Unix* vendors will be if it *DOES* work well on
Windows95 and WindowsNT.  If some "solution" showed up which solved
all compatability problems between every single Unix vendor that
ever lived, that would still only be a tiny part of the current
computer marketplace.

The biggest payback from OpenStep will come if developers decide
to start writing *Windows* applications using OpenStep.  Then,
hopefully, that same application could be trivially ported to Unix
boxes.  Well, relatively trivially ported, at least.  Right now,
anyone who wants to provide a successful PC product for the Unix
marketplace has to basically start from scratch to rewrite everything.
That is just too painful for most developers, particularly if all
that extra work is for a version that will run on the *minority*
platform of Unix.

If a decent number of OpenStep applications show up for Windows as
well as Unix platforms, then the Unix vendors will be in the position
of only having to sell *unix* as a better operating system than
whatever Microsoft is up to.  That'll be worlds better than trying
to having to also answer for the pathetic excuses of productivity
applications (word processors, spreadsheets) that exist for unix.

If unix vendors think that OpenStep may cut into their sales, then
they're saying that their operating system is by definition worse
than Microsoft's operating systems.  I don't think that's true, but
the lack of common applications is hurting unix a lot.

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA