Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!rochester!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau
From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: dozing vendor
Message-ID: <11798@jade.BBN.COM>
Date: 3 Oct 88 19:10:23 GMT
References: <8810031512.AA18608@vger>
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 51

Let me add another voice from the vendor's point of view.

As much as I believe that the relatively wide availability of X11, and the
relatively large number of people writing publically available software for
X is A Good Thing, I also have to recognize that not much of that software
is what you'd call "commercial quality" as far as either performance or
robustness is concerned.  Not that all software has to be of commerical
calliber to be good -- I use, and write, public domain software for X11.

But one expects more from a vendor selling software for money than from a
university grad student or an interested hacker cranking things out for the
fun of it, and X just isn't quite "there" enough to make writing and selling
software reasonable yet.

For example, my real job is to work on a complex, featureful document
authoring system for workstations.  Sure, we'd love to ship an X11 version
of the system today, and customers have certainly asked about availability.
We have to put them off, telling them "not quite yet."

Why?  A couple of reasons.  For one thing, the performance of the MIT sample
servers (which is what most people are using) just isn't good enough to
support really complex software.  We know - we've been there.  We were a
beta site for X11R1, and we've had prototype versions of our product under
X11R2 for months now.  They just don't perform well enough that you'd want 
to use them, and we're not willing to sell them under those conditions.  

(And if we did sell them as they are right now, you can be we'd have people 
lambasting us for selling "slow, buggy software" instead of for delaying 
on shipping the X version; basically, if you're a software developer, you 
can't win :-)

Another thing that delays people -- well, us at least -- is waiting for 
the ICCCM conventions to gel.  When we ship an X product, we want to be as
sure as possible that it's a good X citizen, interacts correctly with ICCCM
compliant window managers and other applications, etc.  As it is, the rules
are changing fast enough that anything we implement today probably isn't
going to work by the time the ICCCM spec gets out of Consortium review.
We just don't believe it's wise to ship a system today that's going to
work correctly with some window managers, some of the time.

Sure, we take a bit of a black eye for not shipping X11 versions of our
software as soon as some people would like.  But we'd take the same black
eye in any case, because the customers wouldn't like what it's possible
to ship right now.  So what're you gonna do?  We opted for waiting until
we can ship systems we're happy with.  Other venders may make other choices,
but don't fault the ones who hold out for quality.

[Needless to say, these are my opinions, and not necessarily those of BBN.]
--
 Matt Landau			Waiting for a flash of enlightenment
 mlandau@bbn.com			  in all this blood and thunder