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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (1497)	4/28/1999 11:38:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

It will take about 20 "C" programmers one year to build a decent GUI. I don't think Berlin has the resources to complete. Maybe they don't. But they have the best chance of anything I've seen. They've got 18 people listed on their web site, so if you and I both join, we're there! ;-) Seriously, I think they are doing alot of the RightThing(tm) technically, and I'd be curious to hear what you would see them do differently from a technical perspective. I think that there are many proprietary GUI's out there that did and do quite well. Many of the promising ones died because they were too proprietary (NeWS is a good example, or OpenLook). It is not the proprietariness of the code that hurts. It is the workability and the universality that counts. and the ease of coding for it. I think the most important thing would be the applications. Users will only flock to a platform if there are applications to run on it. Developers will only write to the platform if there are enough users. We got a chicken and egg thing here. So you have to trick the developers to help jump-start it. The best way to do this is the things you have mentioned: Make the platform easy and consistant to code for. Give superior capabilities. We probably agree on most of the things that fall under those two categories. Microsoft had to release applications itself to jumpstart the Windows platform. But a non-proprietary platform can give a platform that extra magnetism to attract developers and users, helping to speed the jumpstart process. Otherwise, the obstacles to be overcome are just too great.