Wayback machine thread on PowerBASIC for Linux...

[Richard Frank Zverina]

While using Google, stumbled across a link, that took me to the Wayback machine and this thread on PowerBASIC for Linux...  http://web.archive.org/web/20030522082708/http://www.powerbasic.com/support/forums/Archives/Archive-000003/HTML/20020806-5-000273.html

It is a Wayback machine archive of a PowerBASIC forum thread from March 1999 where Dave Navarro advises about PowerBASIC for Linux

Found it interesting, and thought I would share it

I realize that many now use Wine http://www.winehq.org/ to run compiled code on Linux

Richard Frank

[Theo Gottwald]

My personal assumption is, that they had started that project and found that
a) LINUX does generally not pay out for most commercial software
b) the amount to keep it updated is possibly to much for a company of this size and finally
c) there is 64 bit in the air. As a result there would be 4 compilers to keep updated: LINUX 32/64 and Windows 32/64
and that would have been simply too much.

I would not bet on a PB for LINUX in the next 4 Years.

[Christopher Boss]

Markets change over time and while initially a Linux version sounded like a good idea, Linux never fully caught on for the desktop compared to Windows. Also the Linux world tends to mean towards open source software rather than commercial, so again many don't want to pay for a compiler.

A developer of another Basic programming language (who passed away a number of years ago) who had a basic which was cross platform (Linux and Windows) told me he wanted to move to a Windows only version, since people didn't want to pay for the Linux version.

I would not doubt that for PowerBasic, Linux has been a low priority more because of market conditions that anything else.

[Chris Holbrook]

Android is the Linux success story.