Rainer Orth wrote: > James Carlson writes: >> I realize there's a hobbyist market out there for the ZX81's of the >> workstation world, but it's not a place I'd expect any company to spend >> its money. > > That's one of the questions: what's to cost and who has to bear it. I can > understand the cost might increase massively if e.g. a new VM system would > require tons of special code to deal with those old machines, but if > there's no requirement for Sun to test and support US-I, the cost seems to > be far smaller.
I think that's what it all rests on. At least up until now, it was considered just unthinkably poor engineering to plan to have something in the system (a feature or platform or mode of operation) that was not tested and required for others to integrate. How long would US-I support really last if there was a policy that all it had to do was compile -- no Sun engineer making changes anywhere in the system ever had to test the generated code, and needed only to make sure the code still compiled? In other words, "zero cost." My guess, based on what I've seen with other software, says, "not very long at all." Unmaintained system software tends to fall into ruin quite quickly, at least in my experience. I suspect that others believe differently. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
