Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

[Anthony de Boer]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> But there was already WP 5.1 code for unix running with an X interface
> for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO Unix, and Xenix.

And it would be a separate build on each, with porting issues to deal
with.  Windows binaries under emulation gave them just the single build
target, one set of binaries fits all, and dumped the system differences
in Wine's lap.  And, in theory, fixing Wine to run WP would go a long
ways toward helping other programs run on that platform too.

Linux does give a much bigger install base on the Unix side than we used
to have, but even so there are differences, and packaging something for
one distro doesn't get it working on the others immediately.  LSB helps,
but unfortunately not quite to the point yet that someone can release a
generic "Linux" package that you can just plunk in regardless of your
distro or consider preferable to your native package flavour.  So long as
you can release an opensource tarball and generate enough interest and
demand that distro people package RPMs, debs, ebuilds, and whatever else
for you, you're okay, but the community has a bit of a history of not
making things easy for commercial software.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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