Obviously someone as skilled as you (and to a much lesser extent me) is not too much bothered by the lack of support for alien shrink-wrapped software. As you say, we can download, patch, recompile, make and so on to get what we want.
Most folk aren't that way.
I have spent years being plagued by customers or blame-fool managers demanding "compatibility" of various kinds which I knew were irrelevant to their true business needs. It's just the kind of thing that gets asked for. People see it as insurance for when their chosen system becomes defunct, that sort of thing.
Simply imagine: I'm a business customer. I've learned from the idiot press that Linux is the next big thing, and also something of a good thing. So I put it on my wish-list. Soon it's on my mandatory requirement list. If it doesn't run Linux it doesn't get in. So it goes.
The US Navy, for example, is running clustered Xserves on some of its subs for signal-processing. The Xserves run Yellow Dog Linux rather than Mac OS X. There's no obvious reason why the special signal processing software could not be recompiled for OS X instead of Linux, but the Navy requires use of Linux, so that's what the Navy gets.
It's against that sort of stipulation that OS X has to compete. It's irrelevant whether I as a customer can get an app in source or already in OS X. If I'm a customer, and I want a particular shrink-wrapped binary then that's what I want, and that's what I expect a supplier to provide. I say jump, you ask how high.
From that point of view, it would seem to me to be advantageous for OS X to provide binary compatibility for Linux apps. One more tick in the customer's requirements list. So that's why I posed the original question.
GWW
On 17 Dec 2003, at 14:30, Peter da Silva wrote:
Do we have all this already? If you know of a way to run (say) a
shrink-wrapped YD Linux binary on OS X, please point me to the link and
I'll try it out.
We don't need to run Linux binaries to be able to say we do Linux.
OK, tell me, what shrink-wrapped Linux binary do you need to run that you
can't already get for Mac OS X or in source?
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