Re: gem.sys sources

[Ulrich Kuehn <kuehn@GOEDEL.UNI-MUENSTER.DE>]

Hello!
|>
|>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!
|>
That is really bad news, but that is what everybody said before....

|>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?),

Well, as the guy who was responsible for the libs sitting in the gem trap,
I can say, that we had almost all the stuff done that was not goint into
the screen and window manager, which was the part that michael wanted to
write... Unfortunately he did not find enough time to finish that thing.
But anyway, the whole project would need a complete overhaul, as it should
be based on sockets instead of pipes.

|>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?
|>
I am still using it, but the missing support for user ids in the Aes is
disturbing me more and more :) And of course the Psemaphore call in the
trap handler, which is avoiding ALL parallelity of GEM calls.

Regards,
Ulrich