On Wednesday 20 June 2001 19:19, Jonathan Drews wrote:
On Wednesday 20 June 2001 11:23, you wrote:
Gates: Open-source GPL is 'Pac-Man-like'
Asking Microsoft to explain the GPL is like asking the Devil to explain the Bible.
Here is an interesting discovery I made: "Indeed, GCC has spread as far as Microsoft, which ships the compiler as part of its Interix software, which enables Unix software to run on Windows computers." from: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6321677.html
You know if open source and the GPL are such a threat to Mr. Gates how come he uses it?
Actually, I have been at MS TechEd all week listening first hand to the subject of many of the articles commented on lately. I was at the Interix talk yesterday, and it was quite interesting. MS bought a company (forget the name, now) a couple of years ago that had begun to develop a Unix subsystem that worked on top of the Hardware Abstraction Layer for Windows, the same as the Win32 portion does. The Unix subsystem uses the same functional components in the system that Win32 does; i.e., file i/o, networking services, security (don't laugh) are all handled using the same functional subsystems. NT/W2K ships with a POSIX subsystem - the Interix subsystem replaces that. Apparently the MS team that has been working on this has ported over just about anything that you could want, as noted, gcc, but also things like apache. The purpose is not to be able to run something like apache on a Windows subsystem in a Unix environment. The purpose is to be able to run a Unix application and send/receive I/O from that Unix program into the Win32/.net system. I saw a program called tides run on Unix, taking input from a Win32 web form and spitting output to stdout, but pulled across to Win32 and output on the web form. In fact, the output of the tides program could be used like a COM object in Excel, and the data plotted. -ronc