Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Richard M Stallman wrote:
>     IF making free programs working on 
>     windows helps promote GNU/Linux (or Herd) is not that good?
>
> Yes, but we can't assume in general that that is the case.  For a few
> programs, such as OpenOffice and Firefox, the fact that they run on
> Windows seems to be a signficant aid to migration to GNU/Linux.  But I
> don't see that this is true for other free programs.

The programs you mention are end user programs. That they are (or seem 
to be) an aid is perhaps rather easy to detect since the effect is 
rather immediate.

Developers programs might not have an immediate effect, but I believe 
the long time aid might be much larger. This effect is more difficult to 
detect since it is a long time effect. And even so since a lot of things 
must cooperate before user sees the effect.

It looks to me that the Mozilla people have drawn a similar conclusion 
since they offer their own portable platform for development (XUL).