Cc: fsb@asylum.sf.ca.us, comments@caldera.com
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
   Date: Mon, 01 May 1995 21:53:32 PDT
   From: Chris Maeda <cmaeda@cs.washington.edu>

      Date:    Mon, 01 May 1995 23:47:00 EDT
      From:    nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson)
      Subject: Re: Caldera

      Maybe I didn't make it clear enough what they're doing.  They have a
      toolkit that lets you recompile your Windows 3.1 program into a
      Caldera Desktop application.

   That's even worse.  It seems like they will have a hard time getting
   developers to care.  IBM can't do it for OS/2 and they have a much larger
   (and much richer) installed base.  Good luck getting Microsoft Office 
   ported to Caldera.

I believe that over a year ago Novell (at the time) gave a demo of
Microsoft office running on Linux in Windows Emulation.

      The advantage Caldera has over Win95 or NT or OS/2 is that the
      operating system is free.  If they make a way for hardware
      manufacturers to ship Windows 3.1 && Caldera at the same time at no
      added cost, AND they can convince a few software manufacturers to
      recompile using their toolkit, then they can provide some added value:
      a real operating system with protection between processes and users,
      that is technically superior to Win95 and NT.

   1) A free OS is not worth much, especially when the other vendors are
   cutting prices to get market share.  I know of a once die-hard Unix shop
   that is going with Win3.11 and NT3.5 because a free Unix with source code
   did not outweigh the availability of Access, Visual Basic, and low-cost
   industrial-strength relational database technology.

Ah, yes, that paragon of American technology, Visual Basic...

   2) The Caldera advantage has a lot of "if"'s.  The one about convincing
   software vendors to support it seems almost intractable.  How will they
   attack that one?

That approach has had success in the case of the GNU C Compiler.  I
think that *many* people feel the need for a freely available,
standard OS, and if it can run Windows better than Windows, that's
*extremely* attractive.

   3) NT is technically superior to many Unix implementations (Linux included)
   and has parity with all the rest (eg Solaris and DEC UNIX).  And Microsoft
   has control over which way the technology will evolve (eg Win32 and OLE2).
   Everyone else (eg IBM) is just reacting, and slowly at that.  If you care
   about protection, you can use NT.  If you don't care, then arguments about
   how Linux has protection are unlikely to make you switch from Windows.

Occasional things I've heard about the *design* of NT make it sound
better than Linux *if* you're on the microkernel bandwagon.
Concerning the implementation, however, I don't know anyone running NT
who doesn't complain about how often it crashes (perhaps it's just
that PC mentality).

   Chris Maeda (cmaeda@cs.washington.edu)

Joe

----
Joseph Arceneaux
Wells Fargo Bank
jla@stegner.wellsfargo.com