> On Saturday, June 9, 2001, at 05:39 AM, Bohdan Peter Rekshynskyj wrote:
>
> I have xTools by Tenon (good stuff www.tenon.com) and do not have
> problems with my X system (which is needed for the compile of Tk). They
> have, incidentally, ported over Tk for Tcl (which I can't stand or
> want to use).
XTools would be okay for about $79, but $199 is highway robbery for an X
Server that is no more stable than XFree86.
Sorry for the rant, but after reading Mark Minasi's book "Software
Conspiracy" I am a little tweaked about greedy
developers selling shoddy software for outrageous prices. When Tenon
discovered their beta package installer destroyed
OSX installations requiring a complete re-install, they never posted any
warning on their site causing
a lot of damage. They then quietly fixed it later. Not the kind of
software firm *I* choose to support. In contrast, although
OminGroup's OmniWeb is a work-in-progress, they admit their flaws up
front and respond to queries about work-arounds.
I bought their product because that is the kind of company I trust
enough to do business with..
<SOAPBOX>
Tenon works well for rootless-X but, IMHO, it is over-priced for
only that additional
feature over XFree86/XDarwin. It is also more than OSX (including
Aqua and Quartz) in price.
tenon would charge $399 for just Project Builder at their rate.
Tell me which one of those was more work and which one probably got
90% of it's code from
the work of others via Open Source under the BSD license?
I evaluated it and found it crashed no less often than the free X
but at a price that is
almost as much as Microsoft's entire Office Suite, which is a lot
more work to produce.
Personally, I don't know this to be true, but I suspect anyone who
might over-charge up front will nickle-and-dime me later--I've been
down that route before--that's
why I dropped Windows as a platform. Now XP confirms *that* was a
good decision.
Just my opinion, but I think basic tools to display the GUI like X
are the OS vendor's responsibility
and shouldn't have to be paid for at high prices in the
after-market. If Apple wants more software
brought over to OSX, a good solid X supported by the manufacturer
would go a long way to achieving that goal.
I know they are probably afraid of software staying on X and never
getting to Cocoa and Aqua. But they should
provide tools to assist the porting then. On further speculation,
perhaps Mac software vendors have pressured Apple
not to allow an easy path for competitive open source software on
OSX. I hope that is not the case.
</SOAPBOX>
>
