bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (01/28/89)
In article <3231@ima.ima.isc.com> johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine) writes: In article <4474@umd5.umd.edu> feldman@umd5.umd.edu (Mark Feldman) writes: Source is another important topic with universities, which it seems NeXT is still side stepping. The opposition to making source available seems to be more pragmatic than theological, they don't want proliferating slightly incompatible versions of everything that would make it harder to interchange applications. We recently (finally!) received our SunOS 4.0 source tapes. They came standard with complete instructions for putting them in SCCS, so that we could manage our own changes and so that if Sun were ever to release and ship sources to their upgrades and bug-fixes we could easily merge them back in with what we've got on-line. Using SCCS we can easily tell what we've changed from the standard distribution, and so can Sun when finger-pointing time comes. Customers who will go the considerable trouble and expense of getting sources are those who will use them responsibly. I don't want NeXT to support anything I've fixed, unless they fixed it right. I fixed it because they wrote it wrong in the first place! He gave the impression that reasoned arguments could persuade them to release parts of the code, particularly the less propritary parts. Bravo! How long will they need to listen, and how many reasoned arguments will be enough? We (my local colleagues, other users, and comp.sys.next) have been supplying them with arguments for many months now. No visible progress yet... Also, the "less proprietary" parts aren't what is particularly useful. I already have sources to lots of non-proprietary (GNU, etc.) and proprietary (4.3 and V.3) software. What's needed is exactly the more proprietary parts because I can't get them anywhere else when I need them. On the other hand, people do seem to get work done on Macs and PCs without source code, so there's some suspicion that the demands for source code are based as much on Unix tradition as on real need. (*&^#%(censored)%^$#%$#@%^$#) IT'S NOT A PC! There are reasons the UNIX culture has grown up with source access, among them the fact that UNIX is a much more complex environment than that on a typical PC, and can be expected to be buggier. It's also more flexible, and that's a reason both to buy UNIX and to want source. Jobs' PC heritage shows through in far too many points of the NeXT design. UNIX is a different ball game altogether, and comparisons of that sort are not helpful to understanding it. Mach is even more different, and NeXT's proprietary changes to Mach are yet more different still. My problems with NeXT aren't so often with technical issues as with the corporate attitude. NeXT has a nifty start, let's hope they get enlightened before the rest of the world catches up.