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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."

7 of 709 comments (clear)

  1. Java? by Lingur · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wasn't Java supposed to solve this problem? I was under the impression that you could run Java apps on any platform (albeit slowly) without worrying about compatability?

    1. Re:Java? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah - Sorry about that, our bad.

      -- Sun Microsystems

    2. Re:Java? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Obligatory Zawinski paraphrase:
      Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Java." Now they have two problems.

  2. Minorities make life so ... complicated ... by dist_morph · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's just eradicate them once and for all. A homogenous Linux monoculture will be easier to maintain and be to the benefit of all of us.

  3. Re:Portable code is robust code by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Funny

    Tramiel, is that you?

  4. I cannot read English. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Please find me an unbiased report stating that Java is faster than C++ in one of the following languages:

    1. Aramaic
    2. Ancient Egyptian
    3. Setswana
    4. Slovenian
    5. Icelandic

    Thank you.

  5. Well that's why God invented Java... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    and was given to Scott in a dream.

    McNealy: The lady of the lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite....

    H1B coder: Listen, you can't expect to write cross platform stuff just because some water tart threw a compiler book at you!