Date: Sun, 21 May 1995 03:48:01 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com> To: Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@freefall.cdrom.com> Cc: dufault@hda.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: (fwd) Re: Mma for Linux, when? Message-ID: <17788.801053281@freefall.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 18 May 95 16:27:05 PDT." <199505182327.QAA25751@freefall.cdrom.com>
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> To advance a slippery slope argument, settling for Linux application > is tantamount to settling for the Linux operating system. Why run > FreeBSD at all if all the applications are going to be Linux > applications? Why try to encourage more users to try FreeBSD when > Linux is so popular and has so much commercial application support? > We might as well spend our time and energy into making Linux a > better platform and abandon FreeBSD. I don't buy the conclusion, though I certainly see merit in the argument that we should have as many native applications as possible. For better or for worse, many users perceive an operating system's viability as a function of the number of native apps for it. I suppose the logic is that if the ISV felt the OS to be worth the effort, then it must be worth looking at. However, emulation is a different issue and it's ALSO true that the more things you can reasonably emulate the better off you are, and one good way of proving the strength of your emulation is to run the more complex apps. Users who want to transition between Linux or DOS and FreeBSD are naturally going to feel a lot more comfortable if they don't have to go out and re-aquire all the software they collected and/or purchased just because FreeBSD thinks it's too good to emulate the others. That'd be an entirely bogus attitude to take, and one NOT shared by folks like IBM or Apple, who go to considerable pain to emulate Windows and DOS apps even though their native support is _better_ than either (I much prefer native OS/2 or PowerMac apps to emulated Windows ones, but will take whatever I can get when push comes to shove). Let's do both. To assume that we can drop emulation as a side-effect of having native apps available is faulty reasoning. Jordan
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