don@CS.UMD.EDU (Don Hopkins) (03/11/90)
One of the biggest problems with NeWS in the past has been that there was no way to get many of the ports of NeWS that had been done. Sun wasn't selling them, and neither was anyone else. Even though somebody ported it to some particular machine, they had no way of distributing the port to other people, because it was proprietary and they were not set up to sell software (not an easy thing to do in your spare time). If there were a port of X11/NeWS to the SGI, or any other machine for that matter, and the source was available for free, then it could be distributed by the X Consortium, the Free Software Foundation, Cygnus, anonymous ftp directories around the world, and through many other channels. -Don