Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!notecnirp!pep
From: pep@notecnirp.Princeton.EDU (Pat Parseghian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT source, how will they be used?
Message-ID: <15077@princeton.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 21 Feb 89 23:14:12 GMT
References: <890@blake.acs.washington.edu> <882@fornax.UUCP> <922@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Sender: news@princeton.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: pep@Princeton.EDU (Pat Parseghian)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University
Lines: 49

Consider the irony of the situation:
	Where would NeXT be today without Mach?
	And where would Mach be today,
		if CMU hadn't had access to UNIX source code?
NeXT may be the next computer of choice, but not the Ultimate Computer.
In the post-NeXT age, will we simply toss our slick black boxes to the top of
the global garbage heap?  Maybe.  While our behemoth VAX 11/785 across the hall
endures, having crept from Ultrix to 4.3 BSD to Mach to ???.  Sometimes we even
let DEC boot VMS on it.

There is a fragment of NeXT's market, over-represented here, that needs source
code.  The reasons have been stated again and again:  Computer scientists need
it to continue to advance the state of computing through research.  Computer
support people need it to make their users happy through bug finding & fixing
and customization.

By not providing source, NeXT cannot ensure that all NeXT boxes in the universe
will appear identical to the Acme Software Systems' programmers.  There will
always be customers who replace standard utilities with modified versions,
either written from scratch or ported under license.  There will always be
customers (especially at universities) who share their non-standard utilities
with their colleagues.  By not making source available to this minority of
customers, NeXT is guaranteeing instead that this fragment of their customer
base will stray farther and farther from the NeXT standard.
	
	Source should be available.
	Source should be accessible (i.e., reasonably priced).
	Source should be accurate (i.e., as current as possible).

Envision a laboratory full of NeXT cubes, accessible to English and Computer
Science majors alike.  The latter, students in an operating systems course,
have optical discs of their own - containing their first attempts at systems
programming.  They can boot it in the laboratory or in the dorm and
inconvenience no other user when their projects inevitably crash.  The English
majors will never be affected.  Will this vision be reality in 1989?

From the support perspective, we have already wasted more time wondering
"is it us?" when really "it's the software."  For example, set up one client
(and of course, one server).  Attach the printer to the client.  Now try to
send a job to the printer from the server (/etc/printcap calls the printer
"remote", and the client's spool directory is really on an NFS file system).
SUN source differs from the Berkeley/Mach source we have; while we'll bet
that this would work if the client and server were SUNs, it doesn't work if
they're NeXTs.  Sure, it'll be fixed in some future release, but we could
have worked around it much faster (if not fixed it) if we could have seen
the corresponding source.  Instead of lessening the burden of the UNIX system
administrator, NeXT has added to it.

Pat Parseghian, Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University, (609) 452-6261