28 Jan
2005
28 Jan
'05
10:52 a.m.
vp(a)cs.drexel.edu (Vassilis Prevelakis) wrote:
Since this was running Unix V7 (or smth close), I am
sure you can get a postscript viewer running on it (or a tiff viewer
for that matter), while you'd have no chance in hell of getting
Acrobat Reader for it.
This is very close to my original point.
Which gives me a nice excuse to repeat my favorite
line: I use open
source software not because it is free, but because I get to keep the
code (so I do not depend on the code author to port the software to
newer/different/stranger platforms).
I'm getting a feeling that der Mouse is about to remind us again that one
can use GhostScript instead of Acrobat Reader... The problem with
GhostScript is that porting it to a Very Vintage platform will likely be
more difficult than rewriting it from scratch. I once thought about building
it under 4.3BSD-Quasijarus (so I won't have to log into a Linux machine
on the other side of the planet to convert PDF to PS), but one cursory
look at the code was enough for me to scrap the idea.
Open source is of no help when it's unusable.
I have pretty much given up on using any software not written from scratch
by me. It's almost always easier to write the program I need than to port
an existing one.
MS