“We have caught flack thrown our way by some who think offering
CDE tantamount to blasphemy. Others complain that we don’t
guarantee that DeXtop will work on the various freeware X servers.
Yet others just throw rocks because Xi Graphics has the temerity to
charge for software, an item that should be free in their
opinion.”
“Well, setting aside the religious aspects of the GUI debate for
the moment, we have taken the position that Linux, if it is to be
successful, must be successful on the desktop. Then we go on to
explain that to be successful on the desktop, good, stable graphics
and a single GUI are a must. Otherwise the applications developers
will not port their apps to Linux. This to us seems evident and
should be non-controversial. We believe that if Adobe, Microsoft,
and a few other owners of very popular and univesally used products
come over to Linux, Linux would succeed. With several GUIs, and X
servers that are unstable, sometimes unworkable and do not support
new hardware until it is about obsolete, it just seems to us that
the aps guys will just avoid Linux as they did UNIX. Even if the X
server is stable, the graphics are the newest, several GUIs as
design targets will probably be enough to deter the Adobes coming
over….”
“So maybe our original premise was wrong. Measuring Linux’s
success by how many of the most popular and oft used applications
programs were ported to Linux so that Linux could be on desktops in
all the corporations and institutions of the World was where we
‘got off the reservation.’ Is it possible that the ‘freeware
community’ tends to measure Linux’s success by HOW LITTLE of the
software used with Linux is closed source? And ANY proprietary
software packages used with Linux is considered blasphemy? Sure is
beginning to sound like it.”