Re: [seul-edu] Re: X servers for Windows

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

At 03:56 PM 9/3/00 -0400, Michael S. Williams wrote:
...
>I may step it it again here, but is that because of Windows or Windows compiler
>licensing or just not enough interest ? Would not such an application help the
>Open Source community?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. The analysis here is too complicated for me to take a
shot at in an e-mail. 

And I should correct myself in one respect -- much (perhaps all) or the core
GNU tools have been ported to Windows. Apache has a Windows version, as does
Perl. They usually lag their Unix/Linux verssions because development
typically occurs on Linux/Unix, then gets ported to Windows. So there is
some important Open Source (or, to use the term preferred at GNU, some free
software) available for Windows hosts.

The GNU compilers are available for Windows, so the lack of Open Source
development for WIndows is not strictly a compiler issue. The lack of Open
SOurce libraries that support the WIndows API is surely something of an
issue. I think the GNOME team has been addressing this gap, but I don't know
the state of the port of the appropriate libraries (gtk+, I suppose; can
anyone else clarify this) to Windows. 

Since apps that use commercial compilers depend on the libraries those
compilers supply, they would not meet the definition of free or Open Source
software (slightly muchy terms, but I mean they would not comply with the
Debian Free Software Guidelines, a standard which has the advantage of sharp
clarity).

In the end, I think the lack of X for Windows here has a simple explanation
-- support for X on i86 (Intel) haredware comes from the XFree86 group, and
their expertise is on Unix/Linux, not on Windows. 


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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