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Richard sent this privately, but I'll respond via the list, and
maybe others who know more on this subject can fill in some of the
blanks.
Richard Harrisson <tabanna@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>Just have this niggling feeling that Mark Brown IS running Trade Station on
>his Linux platform ?? . . . BUT then probably I am wrong and he is using
>Solaris
>
>http://www.insignia.com/SoftWindows/UNIX/Products/9540_Brief.html
>
>maybe SoftWindows won't compile under Linux ?
I believe SoftWindows is a Solaris/Sparc emulator for Sun workstations
only (maybe Macs too?). I don't know who actually developed it.
Wabi, as I understand it, was developed by Sun, under a very restrictive
license from Microsoft, to do the same thing as SoftWindows, namely,
to run Microsoft applications on Sun workstations. At the time,
Microsoft felt it was in their interest to extend their applications
onto those workstations, so they gave Sun the information to do the job.
Later, Sun entered into an agreement with Caldera to port Wabi to Linux,
apparently with no objection from Microsoft. This was when Linux was
well below Microsoft's radar as a serious contender for the desktop.
Since SoftWindows and Wabi on Sparc must translate machine opcodes
from Intel to Sparc, applications typically run slowly, though the
speed of the old Sparc machines vs the old Intel machines lessened
the pain.
Wabi on Intel/Linux, however, needed no such opcode translation - all
they had to do was translate the system calls to the Linux/X versions,
so applications typically ran faster than under MS Windows.
For whatever reasons, late in 1998, Microsoft cancelled its agreement
with Sun regarding Wabi, and Sun was forced to pull the plug with
Caldera. I expect Microsoft now sees emulators like this on Linux
as a serious threat, and acted accordingly.
The Wine project is a MS Windows emulator that does not rely on
agreements with Microsoft, and so is proceeding rather slowly. I
heard recently that some corportate money is now flowing toward that
effort, so maybe it'll bear some real fruit in our lifetimes. I don't
know what sort of legal trouble Microsoft can make toward these sorts
of emulators, but you can bet they'll keep diddling their applications
and Os upgrades to frustrate them.
With virtually every other sort of application now available in native
Linux format, it seems real-time trading software is one of the last
holdouts.
Jim
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