From: hans@mo.hobby.nl (Hans Oey) Subject: Re: Linux - the future? Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1992 19:41:46 GMT
keith@ksmith.uucp (Keith Smith) writes:
>That is a bunch of drivel. There is more free MS-DOS software than any
>other software out there. Why? Because of binary compatability &&
>*POPULARITY*. It may be a big bag to carry but much of the world has no
>desire to carry their compiler with them everywhere. The free software
>and cheap commercial stuff is quite often work alikes for expensive
>commercial counterparts. Where have you been the last 10 years?
There is hardly any free software for MSDOS (except for
the ported GNU stuff). I mean `free' as in Free Software
Foundation. Source code is essential to that. Read the
GNU Manifesto.
>I haven't even seen a decent "Word Processing" program freebie for Unix.
>Lot's of program editors, but no Word Processors. I haven't seen a unix
>SQL freebie either. dbz and gdb are, well, ... good for what they were
>designed for.
A combination of GNU emacs and TeX is an excellent (and IMHO
a vastly superior) replacement for something like WordPerfect.
I know of at least one commercial site where this is used daily
for business correspondence and all kind of papers. But don't
start a religious war on that.
>I don't anticipate a free SQL anytime soon either. Most technoweenies
>like us are more interested in bit twiddling applications than user
>applications. That's why I'd like to be able to run a commercial app on
>Linux. That way I can not only twiddle bits, but also let other people
>who don't desire this to use the commercial apps.
I'm definitly not a technoweenie. I consider myself more
of an end user. Fed up with unfixable bugs in commercial
software I am trying to make up my mind whether to use
postgress or ingress for database applications.
>I don't know what direction Linus wishes to go, but I just can't devote
>the hardware to it full time, without being able to run the stuff I
>already have, free or not.
Yeah right, you still use wordstar for CP/M!? ;-)