*BSD News Article 74270


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From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: TCP latency
Date: 20 Jul 1996 09:06:49 GMT
Organization: Symantec Corporation
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In <31EE28D3.41C67EA6@star-gate.com>, "Amancio Hasty Jr." <hasty@star-gate.com> writes:

[some deleted]

>be able to level the playing field. Another area that Unix at least
>on the PC area could possibly have a significant impact  is if there
>was a good emulation layer to run Windows 95. You see people have

[more deleted]

I don't agree with this strategy at all, and here is why:

I have run OS/2 since v2.0 and as we all know for a while there IBM was
pushing OS/2 as a better windoze than windoze.

The problem is that your not going to attract users to FreeBSD by saying that
it can run Windoze programs.  It didn't work for the OS/2 crowd and it
ain't going to work for us.  It also doesen't seem to work for the Mac
crowd either, at least according to the sales of those "windows emulator
cards for Macs"

What is going to happen instead is that lazy ISV's will simply have no
incentive to port their apps to FreeBSD, they will just beg-off users by
saying that if the users want to run their apps to run them under emulation.

Worse than that is that it will pull valuable developer time into a project
that is going to contribute nothing.

If IBM had not put Windows support into OS/2 the market would have been
smaller in the beginning, but it would have not given all those ISV's that
had half-assed OS/2 plans reasons to muddy the market.  For example,
for years WordPerfect was making noise about supporting OS/2 and even did
a few ports to it.  They never fully committed to it, as a result a lot of
people _didn't_ buy DeScribe wordprocessor, but just kept waiting for
Wordperfect to get into gear.  If wordperfect had not had the option of telling
customers to run their Windows port under OS/2, then they might have decided
to stop playing around, and left the OS/2 market alone.  That would have
given people like DeScribe more room in the market.

Here is another way of looking at it.  Lets say your a software publisher and
you see the Windows market is very competitive for your product.  You are
small, so you have a choice, you can develop for FreeBSD where there is
maybe only one other direct competitor, or you can develop for Windoze
where there are 20.

Now lets say someone goes and puts Windoze emulation into FreeBSD.
Now, your competing against 21 other vendors, the 20 windoze ones and the
one other FreeBSD one.  At this point it may make sense to hang it all and
go develop for the Mac!  ;-)

Put Windows emulation into FreeBSD and all your going to attract is a
bunch of stinking flies, attempting to push off crappy BSD ports of their
products, expecting the users to buy them just because of their names.
Then, the users buy and start demanding the bugs be removed, making
the flies do some work, and later when the flies do nothing to correct problems
the users stop buying so the flies fly away bitching to everyone who will
listen on how terrible the FreeBSD platform is.