Can someone tell me what this means?

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
> Another stupid question (forgive me, I am woefully ignorant about 
> present-day "state of the Mac" issues:
> 
> If OS X is really Unix under the hood, then why do vendors of several 
> of my high-end applications that are offered in Windoze and OS X 
> versions all say "We have no plans for a Linux version"?  It would 
> seem to be a pretty easy thing to do.

Well, it depends on which API they leveraged to write the application. 
If it's Cocoa (which it probably is...), then it'll be different enough 
from your usual UNIXy stuff that porting will be a problem.  Same with 
Carbon, which is an API which allows one to write software that works on 
both OS 9 and OS X transparently.

Then there are POSIX and Java, for which the implications point to it 
being very possible to port the software easily, but make it difficult 
to use lots of OS X-specific features.

Peace...  Sridhar