Yes, and NeXT could have asked its ISVs to do the same thing back when they ran on 040, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC.
The motivation, though, was not just to make things easier for the ISVs, but also to make things easy for the ISVs' customers. Simplifying the process of buying and installing software was the real thrust of the endeavor. [1] There is real economic value in making things easy for customers.
Why, for example, would web sites offer 1-Click ordering, when entering a credit card number is just a few more keystrokes? Because simplicity makes money flow, and is good for a market.
The Year of the Linux Desktop will never come until these issues become important to the community. Which is to say that it will never happen, because the community, as a whole, has no economic incentive to lower the bar for customers like this.
Ryan Gordan probably could have figured that out sooner, but I'm glad he was an optimist for a little while, at least.
[1] There was also a secondary benefit for system administrators. You could install a single copy of a 4-way-fat-binary on an NFS share and a workstation running NeXTstep of any architecture could launch it over the network.
Except, linux users don't use four platforms on the desktop. They use (nearly entirely) 1. Those use x86-64 are almost entirely clued in enough to grab the correct architecture. And even if they weren't, you could get around this simply by making your installer a shell script, that choose the right dpkg based on the output of uname -m. Hardly overly complex.
I guess that's fine, as long as nobody has ambitions for Linux adoption to grow beyond the relatively small already-clued-in demographic. There's nothing wrong with wanting to stay small.
FWIW, I used Debian/PPC at home for years. But, then, I was also among the small set of people who actually ran NeXTSTEP on a "gecko" PA-RISC machine and a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole. That's the story behind my perspective, anyway.
The motivation, though, was not just to make things easier for the ISVs, but also to make things easy for the ISVs' customers. Simplifying the process of buying and installing software was the real thrust of the endeavor. [1] There is real economic value in making things easy for customers.
Why, for example, would web sites offer 1-Click ordering, when entering a credit card number is just a few more keystrokes? Because simplicity makes money flow, and is good for a market.
The Year of the Linux Desktop will never come until these issues become important to the community. Which is to say that it will never happen, because the community, as a whole, has no economic incentive to lower the bar for customers like this.
Ryan Gordan probably could have figured that out sooner, but I'm glad he was an optimist for a little while, at least.
[1] There was also a secondary benefit for system administrators. You could install a single copy of a 4-way-fat-binary on an NFS share and a workstation running NeXTstep of any architecture could launch it over the network.