Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/04/03/10:28:36
On Thursday 03 April 2003 06:54, Steve Coleman wrote:
> Randall R Schulz wrote:
> > I think we have to work with the legal system, not try to subvert it.
> > Microsoft has a right to set the licensing terms it wants. We have a
> > right to tell them to go to hell. Currently however, and as you note,
> > the power relationship is highly skewed. It ain't easy to "just say
> > no" to Microsoft.
>
> And in some cases you can't say "no"!
>
> A long time ago (showing my age here - lol) when I worked for NASA, I
> first cut my teeth on Cygwin out of desperation to get my job done on a
> Wintel box. The very fact that it did not possess anything even close to
> resembling real POSIX was a constant thorn in my side on a daily basis.
> At the time I was a representative to the X/Open organization and was
> heavily involved in the system benchmarking and conformance testing to
> ensure that all equipment supplied on several large contracts adhered to
> the X/Open standards. That is until the M$ "legal suites" showed up in
> force and muscled there way in through legal threats. Can you imagine
> that? NASA, as big of a government organization as it is, being muscled
> and pushed around by Microsloths lawyers to accept Windows as an X/Open
> complient operating system? Without Cygwin Windoze would never even come
> close to being X/Open complient, and Cygwin at that point was still in
> its infant stages of development.
Lack of cygwin support has impeded the market penetration of Windows XP64,
but it seems Microsoft would rather lose out to linux and HPUX than let their
customers run cygwin. It may be they don't understand how many customers
depend on cygwin, which is their fault too, since they don't support those
customers, just collect the fees and forget them.
--
Tim Prince
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