🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 8 Nov 91 12:13:25 GMT, amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) said:

> [...]
> Even diehard UNIX shops like AT&T USL seems to be starting to acquire
> the attitude that UNIX will lose the desktop and the display, and end
> up being relegated to server machines.

Nah! This depends on the market. Might be that UNIX'll never take over
the mass market, but it will *certainly* keep its position in the
technical/scientific market. I don't think the people at my previous
place of employment would be willing to trade their DecStations and
Sparcs for 486 PC's

> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:

>> We're trying to make applications on Unix friendly enough and
>> consistant enough that Unix doesn't lose the commercial market.
>> Sometimes I'm not even sure it's worth the effort.
>> Some (many?) of you may not give a damn.  There certainly doesn't seem to
>> be much effort in this direction in GNU software.

This has a bit to do with priorities. The main priority of the GNU
project is to get a UNIX-compatible operating system, with source code
*freely* available, up and running.

The GNU OS will be a system made *by* programmers, *for* programmers
(and thus follows the priorities of programmers).

My (unaffilated) guess is: If someone wishes to implement a system
that is friendly to the end-user, on top of the GNU OS, they will be
welcome to do so. However, it will be a looooong time before this is a
priority of the FSF

> Indeed.  Even Cygnus is evidently making most of their money off of
> using GCC for embedded applications, rather than making any headway
> in the compiler market overall.  GCC is a truly wonderful thing, but
> it's missing a lot of things that separate a "program" from a "product".
> Sun's unbundled C compiler may generate worse code that GCC 2.0, but it's
> a better product, and I can use it now.  This can make it worth the money
> and lack of source code...

Uh,...? This was a bit unclear to me: Will the sun compiler be a
better product when GCC 2.0 is released? If so, why?
Apart from performance: Is the sun compiler a better compiler than
gcc-1.40? If so, why?

>> You don't win this game by being right, or being fast, or being
>> technologically advanced (that should all be pretty clear already -
>> we are talking Unix after all), you win *this* game by being cheap
>> and easy.  And Unix isn't either.

> Bingo.

Well, hey! The FSF isn't in business "to win the game",... they have
their own priorities.

- Steinar
--

***** Real Name: Steinar Bang *** EMAIL: steinarb@idt.unit.no *****