Smith, Todd wrote:
>
> The question is, "At what point does releasing a mature closed-source
> application under open-source no longer useful?" I started looking at GEM
> Desktop and I am left with questions without answers. The documentation is
> vague and confusing but it seems like that GEM is both an application
> execution environment and an operating system.
>
I have used GEM before. It was bundled with Atari ST computers.
The real question is:
"Had GEM remained in market play or in open source
development, would it not have grown in complexity and size
along with X/KDE or X/GNOME or Windoze or MacOS?"
My answer is, as long as it was targetted to general purpose
workstations, the answer is yes!
If your target is 8M PDA's with no hard disk, or 32K smart
cards, or whatever micro-controller architecture you want,
that is going to force your software to fit....
So the issue is really what is the target hardware platform
and what is the market for that platform demanding?
I think, in the case of PDA's that's why PALM OS has been
successfull and WindowsCE rather less so.
