Re: AdaOS

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9spbf4$i7l$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
>I wonder why that was? It seems to me that a portable operating system that
>ran on a variety of hardware would be a *good* thing for business. (Some
>businesses.) What got in the way of - say - making it work on a Sun?

Think about this for a minute. Up until a year or so ago, Sun was Microsoft
enemy #1. Sun pretty much makes their money off of hardware sales. Now think
hard... :-)

>A portable operating system with a portable language ought to be good for
>someone who is marketing software, don't you think? Write-once,
>Compile-many? But then, if that were true, Ada with an Ada OS ought to be a
>marketable concept - yet it doesn't seem to gain much traction? What is the
>downside?

For an OS vendor, it may be true that more platforms=more sales. For a software
monopolist that uses OS and business applications dominance as its leverage (as
found by the Federal courts), a completely different set of economics applies. I
suspect that if the verdict to split the company had stood, there may have been
some renewed interest from the MS-OS company for NT ports. But I guess we'll
never know now.

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