FreeSWAN & unnatural monopolies

[David Honig]

At 06:35 AM 12/11/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>Dude, there are HUNDREDS of alternate GUI front-ends (the vast majority
>are not compatible with X (aka MIT's Athens - there's your clue as to its
>popularity). Unfortunately they don't get the technical backing to get a
>significant 'bootstrap' percentage in the market up front. In other words,
>when X got started back in the 80's there were no other GUI's that were
>nearly that advanced. So people used it. By the time the market expanded
>the number of alternative GUI's had a much harder time to get into the
>market.
>

MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC
and [I forget -IBM?] workstations and so developed a device independent
display server.  That it was subject to code bloat is regrettable but its use
is not mandatory.