Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!att!alberta!calgary!xenlink!deraadt
From: deraadt@xenlink.UUCP (Theo A. DeRaadt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT concerns
Message-ID: <34@xenlink.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jan 89 23:37:47 GMT
References: <4474@umd5.umd.edu> <3231@ima.ima.isc.com>
Organization: Xenlink, Calgary, Canada
Lines: 25

In article <3231@ima.ima.isc.com>, johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine) writes:
> I was at the developers' camp two weeks ago and at the banquet, Steve Jobs
> took questions, many of which concerned source code.  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.  He gave the impression
> that reasoned arguments could persuade them to release parts of the code,
> particularly the less propritary parts.  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.

That's some comparison. Yes, people write hacks and hacks and hacks and
hacks to get by bugs IN the operating system, and next release it breaks.
Just look at any program that was written for the original Mac on a MacII,
programs that do anything *really neat* ussually break.

Did you know that every Sun comes with source to the windowing environment
on it? We hacked it ourselves to add full-color backdrops and such, but how
many others have? Having source made it so much easier - we had a starting
point and we could see *exactly* how things were done from the bottom up.
Hate to compare this to Sun's, but did you ever really try to read some of
those manuals? Yet, you go into the source, and it's obvious.
 <tdr.