SEP distributes its software to sponsors and colleagues who want to use it on their local computers. Thus, software portability is an important issue for SEP. In the simplified environment we advocate, systematic compilation checks and occasional ports to non-SEP computers should help to ensure reasonable software portability. However, we would loose the safeguard currently offered by SEP's daily use of its software on multiple platforms. Therefore, it is important that we choose a platform that encourages software portability. We believe Linux meets this requirement.
If SEP software works smoothly on a Linux system, then it will work smoothly on nearly any GNU environment. Since GNU is easily portable to most common platforms, the SEP software becomes portable to all these platforms as well. This indirect portability is especially attractive since SEP may distribute the GNU source code as part of its own SEP software distribution.