Re: [MacPerl] Microsoft funds Perl open-source effort

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 23.50 -0400 1999.06.02, Peter Prymmer wrote:
>It would appear that Apple has been beefing up Applescript in recent
>releases of it's Mac OS, but I think they played a part in the Mach/MkLinux
>port and that comes with perl.  Hence to the extent that Apple recoups
>revenue
>from MkLinux they too are profiting from perl (not to mention the internal
>use
>within Apple engineering).  So I guess that the question
>becomes Will Apple invest anything in perl?

There really wasn't any porting issue with MkLinux, except for a slight
change to the flags to pass for dynamic loading to work, and I provided a
patch for that (after being told what to do by someone else not affiliated
directly with Apple, on a newsgroup or mailing list or something).  Also,
Apple doesn't make much money, if any, from MkLinux.  Perhaps you mean the
other, almost completely unrelated, Mach-based OS project?  Mac OS X?

Mac OS X will make a lot of money for Apple (probably), and it did require
some porting.  The core changes are now in 5.005_57 (under "rhapsody", not
"Mac OS X", which may or may not be a good idea :/ ).  Apple already has
inversted some money in Perl, by having an employee do this porting work.

Will they continue to do more?  I dunno.  Maybe Apple can pay someone to
port Matthias' toolbox extensions to the "rhapsody" perl, or have someone
do it internally (such as Matthias himself!).  I think such an effort would
be best to wait until Carbon is finished, though, anyway.  It still seems a
bit premature to me to invest much effort in it.

Note: I have installed and used Darwin, the open source version of Mac OS X
Server, and its perl seems to work just fine (5.005_02 with some patches
from Apple).  Nothing much to say about it: it's perl.

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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