Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 23 Jan 1997 19:53:57 -0800 (PST) | From | "W. Reilly Cooley" <> | Subject | Re: If Linux is to succeed |
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On Thu, 23 Jan 1997, Jason Benderly wrote:
> Linux needs applications to succeed in business. No question > about it. Not the pathetic Applix or buggy WordPerfect. Why is > it that the Windows API has not been ported to Unix? Why not the > Microsoft Foundation classes? Why not ActiveX/OLE/DCOM.
I proposed that earlier today. One of the biggest problems would be with the copyrights of the Windows APIs. I am not exactly sure if it is actually able to own an interface (i.e., a set of function prototypes and pre-processor definitions), but I suppose it would be roughly analogous to the Look & Feel contention. Does anyone have any legal knowledge about this?
> > The Linux community should also shed the notion that everything > should be free. Prices should not be what they are for Sun or HP > products (multi thousand dollars for a GUI painter) but should > be similar to PC market prices. I know I am willing to spend some > cash.
The problem here lies in the costs of program development. We do, indeed, have lots of good programs, but nothing on the scale of, say, the Adobe(tm) product line, or Microsoft Office. The Gimp and xv are good, but the still aren't Photoshop(tm). TeX processing isn't easy. I've been at this quite steadily for a couple of years now, and I haven't even attempted to learn that. (Sometimes I just use HTML!) I don't really like MS Office per se, but I don't think there is a better WYSIWYG wordprocessor. (And WYSIWYG *is* necessary, if only for formatting just previous to printing.)
In a response to my previous rodomontade, someone suggested that Java apps would change this dearth of applications. My chief reservation about Java apps is regarding performance. Will Java apps perform comparably well in comparison wil native ELF or a.out binaries? (It would, I am sure, outrun Visual Basic(tm).) Would it be possible to further compile Java bytecode into native machine code?
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