Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!alberta!ubc-cs!fornax!stevec From: stevec@fornax.UUCP (Steve Cumming) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT source, how will they be used? Summary: Why I may want a NeXT Why I want source. Message-ID: <882@fornax.UUCP> Date: 15 Feb 89 21:11:17 GMT References: <890@blake.acs.washington.edu> Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada Lines: 56 I plan to buy my Very Own Computer one day soon. I want it to be fast, powerful, Unix like - as much like my working environment as possible. (networked Suns.) NeXT is a definate candidate, considered as a chunk of iron. I also have lotsa things I could do with a a 400dpi laser printer! I also want source code, for several reasons, all of which I am sure are familiar to all of us. All my own experience at work moves me to insist on source. Ever try to make a 4.3BSD vax boot from drive 3? Want your Transcript software to emit something like EPSF code so that Scribe V6+ can use it? Can't figure out why an innocent looking change in you YP databases causes password updating to silently fail? ... ad infinitum. Without source, you are out of luck. And you have to be writing bizarre device drivers or doing REAL (tm) operating systems research to find yourself up the creek. Very reasonable, ordinary every day problems can be made almost impossible without access to the code. I'll also admit a certain hacker fascination with poring over code. I find that source code can help to disambiguate overly terse manuals... :-) But this hacker root puberty stuff is secondary. I only go over source code when I . Where does this leave me? I am going to wait until the FSF has a kernel working. I will then buy the highest- powered biggest-disked system that I can afford, install GNU, and do something obscene yet decorative with the distributed OS. And about two years later, if not sooner, some outfit will start selling iron that FSF kernels are specially good with. They will sell iron and peripherals only. Overheads will be low, cause they won't need mammoth, expensive systems development shops, and the whole nine yards. And a large and growing community of GNU/Mach/FSF users and experts Trailblazed together will help each other out. A fairy tale? I don't think so. When this happens, why would a University research group, or experienced users spend good money for an expensive configuration? And it may happen soon. I think that NeXT is making a big mistake. And let me add that I, too, wish them well. -- Steve Cumming stevec@lccr.cs.sfu.ca {uunet|...}!ubc-cs!fornax!stevec School of CS SFU (604) 291-4399 ... I'll be far off and gone Vancouver, CDN like summer wages.