From owner-freebsd-advocacy Fri Mar 19 11: 7:26 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from xylan.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 849911514D for ; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:06:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com by xylan.com (8.8.7/SMI-SVR4 (xylan-mgw 2.2 [OUT])) id LAA11396; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:05:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from utah.XYLAN.COM by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id LAA13874; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:05:55 -0800 Received: from softweyr.com by utah.XYLAN.COM (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (xylan utah [SPOOL])) id MAA02851; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:05:53 -0700 Message-ID: <36F2A00B.6715411@softweyr.com> Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:05:47 -0700 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Brett Glass Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Netscape browser References: <4.1.19990319083523.03f7c470@localhost> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Brett Glass wrote: > > At 01:14 AM 3/19/99 -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > >In any case, the PR value of having working native ports is certainly > >substantial > > Jordan, it's ESSENTIAL. Companies determine the amount they'll invest > in a platform by looking at NATIVE app sales for that platform. Bzzzt! Wrong again! Software development companies -- remember I've worked for several and even RAN one for a year -- care about how many sales they can get for development dollars. It's called ROI - Return On Investment. Trust me on this, they don't give a tinkers damn about what they're spending their money on, just on the ration of how much in to how much out. As a for instance, this was a critical choice when Axent decided to release Security Toolkit on SVR4/x86. We searched long and hard to identify a least common denominator version of SVR4/x86 so we could develop ONE VERSION that would run on all x86 ABI compliant systems, and maintained the other systems for testing only. It ended up running on NCR, Dell (yes, Dell had their very own SVR4 product in those days), Intel's in-house version, and UHC SVR4 (which was probably very close to the Dell version). I don't remember if they ever got it to work on Solaris x86, but it probably did. -- Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket? Wes Peters +1.801.915.2061 Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message