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SubjectRe: If Linux is to succeed
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?

W. Reilly Cooley
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