ellis%siemens@cadillac.siemens.COM (Ellis Cohen) (09/22/87)
> I contend that "binary-only" distributions are worse than no > distribution at all. I agree that source distributions are much preferred to binary, however, our employers are not necessarily as enlightened as we are, and public binaries are sometimes the best compromise that can be arranged. We had an agreement with our top-level management that the tiled window manager source would be freely distributed. At the end of the summer, Siemens suddenly realized that they didn't want to give it away. There were many discussions, arguments, and a lot of wierd politics which I wont go into. Suffice it to say that our position lost and our group was pretty upset. But Siemens is after all a business, and top-level management didn't want to give something away if they might eventually be able to sell it. Since it was clear they wouldn't freely release the source, we considered other possibilities. There may be source license agreements for universities sometime in the future. But again, because of marketing considerations, this probably won't happen until January if it happens at all. Finally, we managed to get permission to distribute object code for the Sun and MicroVax. These machines were chosen because our group has easy access to them, and because of various other high-level Siemens political considerations. We will still be trying to get permission to release object code for other machines. We are well aware that binary distributions make bug reporting and fixing a serious problem. In fact, rather than rushing our release to coincide with the X release, we decided to test the manager extremely thoroughly, so that (we hope) there won't be any serious bugs. 95% of the code is taken from a tiled window manager that supported Andrew (rather than X11) clients, and that has been in regular use for over a year, with the last major bug found and fixed about 5 months ago. The only new code is X11 specific, which is, of course, wildly hairy, and we are testing it as thoroughly as we can. Currently, we are planning to release the window manager on Oct 2, but if we need to, we will delay distribution rather that distribute something buggy. We think our window manager is pretty good, and we hope it will be widely used (or at least widely tried). We know that binaries are not the best; we'll just do the best we can do.