Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!lgl
From: lgl@blake.acs.washington.edu (Laurence G Lundblade)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXT source, how will they be used?
Message-ID: <890@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 89 05:44:21 GMT
Organization: Univ of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 44

It seems to me that it is important to consider how sources would be
used in this university versus developer debate.

Perhaps the deabte isn't so serious, for much of the use of sources at
the university will be to fix security holes (especialy related to the
Internet), implement local access policies to public machines, and
accomodate unusual peripherals and lab equipment. I don't see how
these changes will break many applications.

The other use one might find at a university is good honest systems
research and developement. It will be in the univsersities interest to
maintain as much compatibility as possible, and those with these
modified systems will take responsibility for broken applications. At
the least NeXT will learn what extentions they don't want to do at
a pretty low cost.

Commercial system developers probably care the most about corporate
and commercial clients with lots of dollars. These customers are going
to want the purest, approved original system and not some university
mutant.

Certainly anyone hacking the system source to make their little
application work should be flamed, get bad reviews in Byte and scowled
at by NeXT, universitites and other comercial developers. Are there
developers that would do this given the chance?

That is I think source can be given to the universties with little
negative effect, and some positive effect to commercial developers.

I think it is poor to compare the case histories of Mac and Sun to
each other for they were targeted at totaly different markets and come
from very different world views. NeXT is very interesting because it
is trying to be both. This is a hard place to be. (keep that asbestos on,
NeXT) I think most will agree that UNIX, DEC and Mac have benefitted
by having ties with universities in that the products were improved
and that a generation of users and progammers grew up on these systems.
Wouldn't NeXT like to maximize that benefit and give us source? 

Even if we don't really need it, how about just to be nice and make us
feel happy?

.....Laurence                                lgl@cac.washington.edu
Networks and Distributed Computing           206-534-5617
University of washington