>> Somehow, I think people in free-OS camps are unlikely to find an
>> argument based on making the OS friendlier to binary-only commercial
>> code compelling.  I sure don't; heck, if mine were the guiding
>> vision, the OS would be almost actively hostile to such code.
> At the risk of starting a flame war,

Sigh.  I suppose this really doesn't belong in port-sparc.  I'm going
to make *one* further public post on this thread, to explain my
position, such as it is, since at least one person has misunderstood.
Any further correspondence from me will be private; I'll be glad to
continue the discussion in private.

> this seems like a poor attitude to take.

A poor attitude from whose point of view?

> I use freely available packages but I do not consider the quality of
> many popular packages to exceed or even equal the quality and
> usability of packages I paid money for.

I agree.  There's a lot of very high quality commercial software out
there.  So what?  I never claimed otherwise.  I simply remarked upon my
own opinion.  I've seen commercial packages that elicited a reaction
from me along the lines of "gee, this is really nice, I wish I could
use it, too bad it's commercial licensed binary-only, well, c'est la
vie".  To me, commercial software is as completely unusuable as
software that works only on architectures I don't have.

> "But WE have the source code!!!"  So the fork() what?  How many
> hundreds/thousands of dollars in TIME do you waste trying to get it
> to work when you have the source?

Heh.  It's true that when I don't have the source (at work, this means,
of course) I don't waste time trying to frob the code to make it work
when it doesn't already.  But the price is, of course, that I never can
make it work.  I don't waste time reaching for the unattainable; the
point is that having the source makes the goal non-unattainable.

> Finally, the comments don't change the fact that most businesses run
> commercial packages that are critical to their daily use and Free
> OS's CANNOT replace commercial OS's till they can run those
> applications as good or better than the commercial applications.

True.  Again, so what?  Are you under the impression that I want
everyone, including commercial shops, to be running NetBSD?  I don't.
I don't believe _any_ single OS can suit all targets, and I see no
reason to try.  (Many (most?) businesses run COBOL applications.
Should we therefore require that NetBSD come with a COBOL compiler?)

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu