> > > Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
> > >  APPLE AND OPEN SOFTWARE
> > >  FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE LINUX FOR
> > >  POWER MACINTOSH
> > Sounds good to me; it means the rest of the world - including us - gets
> > helpful power-mac info free, in the form of known-working source code.
> > What am I missing?
> 
> Well, it's a bit disappointing in that the Linux camp, which is interested
> in nothing BUT marketing ;-), gets to crow about being the only PMac "unix"
> for several months until the BSD camps reverse engineer the Mach changes.

Given that 4.4BSD VM is derived from Mach MK VM, it should be easy...,
unless of course OSF has mutated its VM system differently enough from
CMU's original form.

> It's also possible (though I don't know) that the published information will
> be insufficient, if the Mach port relies on the MacOS running (or Copland or
> some compatability hook).

Fortunately, according to the press release and Q&As, it's going to run
on its own.  They don't even plan to provide MAE for OSF/Linux.

> Is anyone thinking about porting NetBSD to the Mach 3.0 microkernel, so that
> several months of reverse engineering won't be necessary when this finally
> hits the FTP sites?  I'd hope OSF hasn't fiddled with the Mach interfaces TOO
> much in the process of doing this work.

I was a subscriber of the bnr2ss mailing list a while ago.  They were
trying to build a Net/2 based single server running on top of Mach
MK...  Better yet, I believe they were working on it using NetBSD as
the hosting platform.  Does anybody know about the project?  It was
more than a year ago last time I heard anything from them, I think.

> (I just hope the CHRP hardware stays on track, since it will be well-defined
> enough to just do a straightforward port.)

I sincerely hope so, but I fear Apple may insist to leave some grey
area where they can do whatever they feel like doing...

ken