Strategy (was Re: Improving copyright)

[Niall Douglas]

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On 14 May 2004 at 21:44, Benoît Sibaud wrote:

> > Are we talking about the same system here? I can run my Win95 and
> > often my DOS binaries unmodified on the latest Windows. A Linux
> > binary from 1996 stands *zero* *chance* of running unmodified on the
> > latest Linux.
> 
> Just for fun, on a Debian Sid 
> [snip]

Well you're not exactly comparing apples with apples here. Many 
command line programs are simple enough that a FreeBSD built binary 
runs on Linux fine because it uses nothing more than the basic POSIX 
API (despite different clib's) which is of course identical on both 
as both are compiled with GCC.

Your typical 1996 Windows binary would contain a good portion of GUI 
code and possibly some MFC or COM eg; WordPad. Let's leave out the 
MFC and COM and assume it's a pure Win32 API application as that's 
roughly equivalent to X11 - say Notepad.

If you can find me an X11 binary from 1996 than runs unmodified on a 
modern installation without using some legacy binary compatibility 
package then I'll gladly retract my assertion.

Cheers,
Niall





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