Re: Linux Binary Compatibility

[Jeff Bailey]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 05:53:05PM +0200, Farid Hajji wrote:
> > My only questions is: Why would we want binary compatability?  Every
> > OS/app that I can think of that used this as a selling feature (OS/2,
> > Wine, Win95 for Win 3.1 apps) failed miserably at the emulation
> > (unforseen gotchas!), and tended to fail to attract the attention of
> > the end users.

> First of all, the world is not perfect. There are plenty of binary
> applications out there, that don't come with source. Some of them are
> even popular, e.g. JDK, StarOffice, Maple+Mathematica, Oracle etc...

> Now you could argument, that the Hurd is supposed to support free
> (or at least open source) software onlay. 

I'm not arguing for Free Software only.  One of the things I like best
about us sharing a libc with Linux is that porting *should* be no
harder than a recompile.  Part of the Debian/Hurd porters work is to
help remove any recompile barriers from thousands of programs.

However, I think it's important to ask people (Free and Non-Free) to
recompile their software.  To understand the differences between the
Hurd and Linux.  We don't have path limitations, maximum hostname
limitations.  We don't restrict alot of features to 'root' only.

I feel that by permitting people to run their binaries on our system,
we'll be 'another Linux port'.  There will be no reason to mention
"Runs on the Hurd".  Ultimately, people will begin to demand that we
do things the way Linux does.  GNU's not Unix, but Linux is.  GNU
permits us the freedom to do things differently, and hopefully better.

I beleive that people will *want* to use the Hurd.  Right now, I
suspect most of us use the Hurd because there's something about the
architecture that we like, or some potential project that we see using
this for.  Or maybe just as a cool hack. =) But, I think we'll soon
see people saying "I want my users to have the right to chroot", or
"Why can't my user write their own ftpfs" or will start to want to use
a filesystem representation (like /proc) without hacking the kernel
and without needing to be root.

And then we've won. =)

Hmm - I'm apparently being long winded today, sorry.. =)