Intel OS X... I'm late to the party

[Fairlight]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 05:45:25PM -0500, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Walter Vaughan cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> Fairlight wrote:
> 
> > I don't get it.  There's fP for FBSD.  OS/X is FBSD under the hood.  Why
> > would it not run natively on the same x86 hardware?
> 
> Under the hood it's freeBSD userland, but the lowest level kernel is Mach, so 
> the closest thing that OSX represents is Hurd with FreeBSD userland and 
> middleware, with a X-Windows replacement called Aqua.

Mach should be a non-factor.  If it's anything like NeXTStep (and I have
every reason to believe it is, since it was based heavily on it), it's the
exact same model, and Mach was nothing but a tool to get BSD 4.2 running on
68k hardware.  Actually, why would Mach be running for x86 hardware at
all, since it needs no bootstrapping like that, and can run a FBSD kernel
natively.  I'll buy that OS/X on non-x86 runs Mach, yeah.  You sure about
on x86 chips?

> On the other hand, it *should* be trival to create a character based
> version of filePro for both workstations or X-Server's. That no one has
> ponied up $$$ to do so is another issue.

I hate to say this, but it's not worth the money to fP-Tech.  Literally,
Mac is what, at best 5% of the market (last figure I actually saw was a
year or so ago citing 3% and I'll give it a hike due to OS/X popularity).
Windows and *nix make up the remaining 95%.  When you're already
floundering aimlessly in 95% of the market, why oh why would you port to a
platform representing such a small market share?

Maybe if Mac users suddenly need a cheezy Biometrics package, but I credit
the Mac crowd with more intelligence than that.  :)

> Too bad filePro's not opensource. Could get a Google Summer of Code
> intern to do all the heavy lifting.

You've got to be kidding.  Hell, they won't negotiate with me to acquire
OneGate, even though it blows their own offering out of the water.  Why?
Because it's not compiled and controllable by the license manager.  (Last
time I had the discussion, Bill Randall was still with them and told me
it would have to be C-based/compiled for protection to be a starter for
them.)  Nevermind that I'm about (about being a relative term--timing is
not firm yet) to take OneGate fully AJAX-capable and stick a nail in fPCGI
with a bunch of other added stuff--when I already beat their product in
oh-so-many areas.  If they were smart, they'd come to an arrangement with
me, but that's not likely given what I've been told in the past.  (Yes, you
read that right...fP data will be accessible via AJAX if I pin this down.
Anyone interested in beta testing it specifically in an AJAX context should
let me know, as I don't know the other parts of AJAX like JS and DOM well
enough to wholly test that myself--I'm coding to specs.)

It's amazing how control is such an issue with them that they'll let a
license manager make their users' lives harder.  I'm not saying their
product is worth nothing, I'm saying it's not worth whatever time and cost
they sank into a full license manager.  It's also a slap in the face to
their customers--either you trust your customers or you don't.  Anyone who
lived through the 80's pirating/protecting merry-go-round should recognise
that it leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing.  A lock keeps only an
honest man out, believe me.  There are articles out there on how to copy
and use a CDR that's copy protected with a variable data rate along the
spiral under Daemon Tools.  Interesting read, that.  But it shows how
ingenious these folks are when they want to be.

They should take my tack and invest whatever they put into license
management into features instead.  The picture might be rosier.

No, I can never see fP going open-source.  Especially with the current
management dynamic.  But hey...they have that 0.5% or whatever of the
market share (I'm pulling a number out of thin air, I have NO idea what the
actual figure is) locked in a stranglehold, lemme tellya.  :)

mark->
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