From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) Subject: Re: Is this becoming comp.linux.advocacy? Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1993 05:00:07 GMT
In article <1993Aug11.142541.16315@taylor.uucp>
mark@taylor.uucp (Mark A. Davis) writes:
>most software companies will likely never have interest in
>porting to Linux. In theory, at least, *WHO CARES* once Linux has full
>COFF (and ELF to a much lesser extent) compatibility *YOU WILL BE ABLE TO
>RUN THE COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE*.
There also happens to be a support issue involved.
In my early days with Esix, it was 99.9% stock AT&T/USL s5r3.2. The main
change of 3.2 over earlier Sys5 releases was the inclusion of
Microsoft-licensed code to run x.out binaries and other code that gave
AT&T Unix a high degree of SCO compatibility.
SCO WordPerfect ran out of the box on Esix, with the exception of a
glitch in how it dealt with the console.
Calls to WordPerfect were useless. They'd ask me what release of SCO I
was running the package under, I'd say Esix, and they'd hang up after
verbaly shrugging their shoulders. This from a tech support department
I've otherwise considered fair and competent. I can't blame WordPefect,
they didn't know what an Esix was at the time. At one point I lied and
said I was using AT&T Unix (once they supported *that*, and that worked,
because there was an *extremely* high degree of commonality between Esix
and AT&T 3.2. I figured out a workaround to the console problem, but
would not have been able to without that lie.
It is *not* enough to say, or even to be able to generally prove, that
system X runs binaries made for system Y. For a self-suppporting system,
perhaps, but many end-users like to know that their application vendors
will stand behind what they've sold. It's all too easy for someone in a
commercial tech support role to use your esoteric-but-compatible OS as
an excuse to write off your bug report.
Maybe the time will come when software vendors will explicitly report
Linux as being supported by its generic Intel binary. Just as Esix
eventually gained support as a product in its own right, so may Linux.
But make no mistake, being able to run the binary, on its own, is *not*
enough if it's not supported by the developer.
>On a large system such as ours at work, the
>OS is less than 1% of all Computer Services costs- no big issue. But yet,
>if you have a distributed system with lots of nodes and need Unix running on
>each node, the OS cost can go rather high.
I believe Linux has a far, far greater potential as a workstation OS
rather than that of a server.
--
Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
"It costs a lot of money to look as cheap as I do" -- Dolly Parton