Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!neoucom!wtm
From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Development
Summary: both a trap and a blessing
Keywords: Developers info package /source code
Message-ID: <1495@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 89 21:08:02 GMT
References: <67@kopasker.is>
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 38


I would prefer source be available if possible.  It might be fair
to attach a fairly high monetary cost to furnishing source, thus
assuring that only companies/people who really, really, honestly
need it go to the effort to get source.

There are some advantages to keeping source proprietary.  The Apple
Macintosh systems are good examples.  With the Mac. it is often a
pain in the neck to code in the manner Apple prescribes.  There is
a strong temptation to say "if I knew where to pointer to blah-blah
were, I could just go in and modify the pointer directly".
Unfortuantely, the Mac. ROMs have undergone fairly frequent
revisions, and the internal structure of the current 256K ROMs is
vastly different from the original 64K devices.  Unfortunately,
witholding source hasn't stopped industrious coders from reverse-
engineering the salient sections of code and hacking in.  Even
fairly main-line applications, even some from Claris (Apple's
software spin-off company), have been guilty of poking around in
the O/S and have been burned when new ROMs appeared.

The same situation is analogous to different revisions of the Next
kernel.  One hopes that the cube has enough horsepower that most,
if not all, of the time going through the high-level interface to
system services will not be overly penalizing, unlike the original
Macs. which were pretty s-l-o-w.

It wouldn't be too surprising that people writing networking stuff
would need to have access to source to really understand the kernel
data structrues and software interfaces.

I can see both sides of the argument.  But.. I believe source
should be available at a price, if you really need it....  There
are quite a few times when I've been very glad that we have a
source license for our bsd relase.

--Bill
  wtm@impulse.UUCP
  ...!lll-winken!scooter!neoucom!impulse!wtm