Porting to Windows

[Alex Martelli]

Nils Kassube wrote:

> Ramon Leon Fournier <moncho.leon at gmx.net> writes:
> 
>> Porting software to Windows won't help anyone except Microsoft, not
> 
> It helps to put food on the table. Case closed. Welcome to
> reality. It's nice here, isn't it?

Quite apart from potential monetary gain -- it is simply a false
assertion that "porting software to Windows won't help anyone except 
Microsoft", even if one is doing the porting entirely for free.

Consider my old ultralight laptop: I simply cannot run anything
but Win/98 on it (Linux doesn't support its indispensable sleep
and hybernate functions, nor its built-in modem, etc etc) -- and
yet, for reasons of weight and ruggedness, that's the laptop I end
up traveling with in by far most of my trips.

So, for any given piece of software: if it can run on Win/98, then
it's potentially available to me when I travel -- if it can't, I
can only use that software at home, not on my frequent trips.  It
is clear, therefore, that "porting software to Windows" (win/98 in
specific, in my case) can help ME -- assuming that software is any
good, of course -- by letting me use it when I'm traveling.

Incidentally, making one more piece of software available for
Win/98 isn't going to help Microsoft in any way, of course -- they
are not seeling Win/98 any more, nor even supporting it any longer.
So, it can ONLY help people who have, in the past, purchased it,
and for whom moving to other OS's on the same hardware may be a
problem (laptops' modems and power-control a frequent cause of
such problems).  Porting to Win/XP is different, of course;-).


Alex