gem.sys sources

[ersmith@netcom.com (Eric R. Smith)]

I also wish that we could have gem.sys source code. Unfortunately, this is
almost certainly *never* going to happen. GEM is the property of
Digital Research (now owned by Novell, I suppose) not Atari, and the license
agreement that Atari signed is extremely restrictive. I heard that we
couldn't even send source code to Atari subsidiaries -- only Atari Sunnyvale
is allowed to use it!

What we (users: I'm speaking here as an ordinary user, definitely *not*
as an Atari employee) really need is a freeware GEM replacement. I can
see two distinct possibilities: (1) PRAX (whatever became of that? Michael?),
or (2) a GEM server running on top of X11. (2) would also have the
advantage of perhaps being portable to Linux/68K.

Is there interest in this? Or does no-one use the AES any more?

(Again, let me emphasize that I'm speaking as a "private citizen". Atari
is, so far as I know, not particularly keen to lose sales of MultiTOS :-)).

Eric