Two recent events have raised intriguing possibilities for addressing the comparative paucity of applications on Linux (CI No 3,441). One is the ruling by a US federal court judge that Microsoft Corp must hand over parts of the Windows 95 source code to Caldera Inc (CI No 3,463). Caldera accuses Microsoft of artificially disabling Windows under rival versions of DOS – Caldera’s own DR DOS, for example, acquired from Novell Inc in 1996. In doing so, Caldera alleges, Microsoft has defrauded alternate DOS vendors of years’ worth of revenues. The case goes to court in June next year. The weakest win for Caldera would see Microsoft forced to modify Windows to run under DR DOS the same way it runs under MS-DOS. The strongest win for Caldera, however, would have a judge make Microsoft document the interfaces that Windows uses to talk to DOS. With those interfaces public, it might be possible to support Windows on other kinds of DOS – on the Linux DOS emulator, for example. Some performance would be lost, but Linux is pretty fast on the same hardware, so it could all even out. The upshot: Linux users would be able to run applications originally developed for Windows. It’s a messy solution, and you’d still have to do something about the parts of Windows that talk directly to the hardware without going through DOS. A more elegant solution has already been proposed, this one by open source developer Don Yacktman. Yacktman has called on executives at Apple Computer Corp to publish parts of the Mach kernel that underlies Mac OS, and to release them with the Yellow Box developer tool kit (CI No 3,466). Publishing Mach is effectively the same as publishing Mac OS’s interfaces. If Apple were to take this step, open source developers could devise a version of Linux to run where Mach is now. Hey presto, Mac OS applications on Linux. Both solutions have the felicitous side-effect of providing Linux with a graphical user interface already familiar to non-technical types. At the moment Linux lacks a strong GUI, not least because development effort is divided between advocates of the partly- non-free KDE and evangelists for pure-open-source Gnome. It’s not really a question of slapping a smiley face on Linux, anyway. Linux, Windows and Mac OS are all interesting general- purpose operating systems with different strengths and weaknesses. What users really need is freedom to choose the right tool for the right job. To avoid anarchy in a heterogeneous world, there would need to be a single set of APIs to develop to; fans of the former NeXt environments propose Yellow Box as just such a framework, hence Yacktman’s desire to see it released as open source. Others worry that Yellow Box, like the Windows APIs themselves, are old and compromised by the need to support legacy systems. That’s how it is with software. Every time you think you’ve solved a problem, someone comes up with 23 new and subtly different sub-problems.
