[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[David Damerell]

On Monday, 5 Feb 2007, Chris Jones wrote:
>Christopher Hunter wrote:
>>It breaks compatibility with old programmes
>>(necessitating re-purchase of existing software), it has serious
>At least part of the reason why the Windows APIs are such an insane
>tangle of different APIs to do the same thing is that throughout
>Windows' lifetime, stupid third party developers have done stupid things
>and MS has to keep adding workaround after workaround to keep their
>stupid apps running.

Except they don't do that all that hard, and it doesn't have to be
that bad.

They don't do that all that hard; look at the 2K Compatibility
Kit. This is an extremely useful tool that's a huge (at least a
hundred) assortment of shims that wrap around third party applications
to overcome assumptions no longer valid. The point is, the default
APIs have _not_ bent over backwards to retain compability with all
third-party applications.

It doesn't have to be that bad; IBM's mainframe OS, which I think is
called z/OS this week, retains compatibility for S/360 applications
from decades ago. They do this because they _don't_ change the API
between versions of the OS and pretend it's the same one, breaking
applications that use the old version; they have a new API (which
might be very similar) and keep the old API around doing what it
always did.

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