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Porting Open Source to Minor Platforms is Harmful

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-one-thing-at-a-time dept.

Tamerlan writes "Ulrich Drepper posted a blog entry titled "Dictatorship of Minorities". He argues that open source projects' attempts to support non-mainstream (read "non-Linux") operating systems slow down development and testing. While Ulrich may be biased (he is a RedHat employee) he has the point: if you ever read mailing list of any large open source project, you know that significant piece of traffic is about platform-specific bugs or a new release broken on some exotic platform."

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  1. Re:Java? by dangrover · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Yeah, it's strange.

    I've never used a Java app that doesn't:
    1. look horrible. Either use completely custom, ugly UI elements, or a bastardized Aqua.
    2. Run incredibly, unusably slow. "What's it doing, and will it ever finish?"
    3. have tons of bugs, even if written by perfectly competant programmers.
    4. Freeze or become unusable randomly. Eclipse is the worst at this -- sometimes it'll freeze and be totally unresponsive, but when I quit it from the dock, it will act all passive agressive and show a dialog box saying it's saving my work, then quit gracefully. The bastard.


    It's weird, because Java seems to be a decent language, even for real application development, just the implementations of the platform can be horrible, especially on the Mac. I don't understand enough of the mechanics to make more specific statements regarding the JVM and bytecode and such, but geez, it can't be that hard.

    As for open source apps, for many mac users, it's not enough for an application to just run. I've complained about custom interfaces before to a PC friend, and he said "Oh, it must be horrible that apps run without an Aqua skin." (missing the point obviously) But it's more than that -- many OS X ports of open source apps are not consistant with themselves, let alone the OS, sometimes handle file operations completely wrong, and, in short, aren't up to the level of quality Mac users expect. I'm not saying the ports shouldn't be made, it's great that it's being done, but it leads to confusion when someone says that something is able to run/work/whatever, and it does it so horribly that it effectively is of no use at all, in the case of some apps.

    I don't mean to sound snotty, but it's like the old joke "how many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg?" / "four. calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."