Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT and sources Message-ID: Date: 1 Feb 89 22:32:27 GMT References: <651@blake.acs.washington.edu> <169@Portia.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 34 In-reply-to: rick@Jessica.stanford.edu's message of 31 Jan 89 18:28:48 GMT In article <169@Portia.Stanford.EDU> rick@Jessica.stanford.edu (Rick Wong) writes: Most of the folks arguing for source availability seem to be coming from a UNIX or networking standpoint. I would like to make a pitch for source availability for the AppKit. I agree with your reasons, and will add another (which I already mentioned long ago) for distribution of user-level sources. When we get another computer on our network, I can almost always give it a set of X11 clients with very little trouble, so that the new machine can be used "seamlessly" from our Suns, HPs, RTs, etc. I can do this because I have sources to the X11 protocol and toolkit libraries as well as to the clients themselves. It becomes a (relatively) simple matter of copy-and-compile, with some occasional porting woes, to get onto a new architecture. Most NeWS clients are almost as easy, for the same reasons. The NeXT machine's only interface to the compute power other machines on the network is via a (buggy) terminal emulator running a remote login application (rlogin, telnet, etc.) It's embarassing to have such a primitive asynch-tty worldview in a window next to the spiffy applications that can run on NeXT machines. In The Old Days, we were happy to have systems connected by standards at the level of RS-232. Then if it didn't have TCP/IP it didn't come in the door. Now our users are surprised at the existence of a machine (our Encore Multimax) that still doesn't integrate into our NFS network (two years after they sold us NFS, BTW). Just as YP makes every workstation look just like another, the users simply expect remote X and NeWS clients to run on everything on our network. NeXT should distribute sources to their clients and protocol and toolkit libraries so that users can integrate the NeXT machines into their existing environments.