FreeSWAN & unnatural monopolies

[Jim Choate]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:

> MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC
                      ^
                      What letter is next to 'a' on the keyboard? You
                      really should refrain from ad hominims.

> 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.

Nobody said ANYTHING was mandatory, as usual changing the rules in the
middle of the game.

What happened was that it was the only game in town. It got picked up by
the Unix geeks and next thing you know there was a collection of code and
apps that were written for X. It would have cost entirely too much to
change to something else and throw all that code away (eg consider the
life time of a typical piece of COBOL).

Economic & Technical Inertia


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