[TUHS] Re: Other POSIX Candidates?

[Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com>]

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To summarize this discussion, if I may, the unifying driver was developer
friendliness, with all of its deeper implications, that drove the process.

Reflecting on this theme, I note that MSFT focused on developers in the
golden age of Windows.  Some of it was investment in powerful IDEs but an
awful lot of it was stuff like their MVP program that created community as
well as offering participants some differentiation in their competition for
customers.

Looking back, the community-building aspects attracted me in the early days.

Marc
=====
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On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 11:57 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 07, 2024 at 06:25:12PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> >
> > Relevant to Clem's point, it seems like the iBCS
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Binary_Compatibility_Standard
> served to
> > try and provide some uniformity for ISVs providing binary software on a
> > variety of x86 UNIX.  The bit it says about Linux having support is true
> > too, I have some old boxed Linux distros and that is one of the features
> > they advertise.
>
> Around 1994, MIT purchased a site license for a proprietary
> spreadsheet program for SCO because we knew it would work on Linux
> (and we had a lot of Linux usage on campus; we had ported a good chunk
> of the Project Athena infrastruture, including the Andrew File System
> to Linux).
>
> An amusing anecdote; I worked with one of their primary software
> developers so we could get a custom build of the software that would
> only work if the IP address of the machine was 18.X.Y.Z, since MIT had
> class A network.  This person would eventually become one of the
> founders of Red Hat, and I told him that we were purchasing it
> intended to run it on Linux.  He told me that this would be perfectly
> fine, because he had compiled the iBCS binary on Linux.  Turns out the
> development environment on Linux was far more developer friendly (at
> least in his eyes) than SCO, so he was building a SCO/iBCS binary on
> Linux.  Since he had done his basic automated regression testing on
> Linux with iBCS emulation, and only later sent the binary to do QA on
> the SCO client, he was quite confident that it work just _fine_ on our
> student's Linux desktops.
>
>                                    - Ted
>

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