Porting Open Source to Minor Platforms is Harmful

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."

Comments

Re:Adverse Affect For Me

[andreyw]

Any reason why you're not running Solaris 10 on the Ultra?

He does have a point

[ShatteredDream]

The problem with all of this "choice" is that to be able to compete with Windows, MacOS X or even Zeta in the long run, Linux distributions have to have all of their components that tightly integrated. That means that ideally the KDE, X.Org and Linux developers need to be all on the same sheet of music to make sure that their components work very, very well together. Most people cannot even tell you what GDI is on Windows, or Quartz is on MacOS X, so why should they have to know what X.Org is and why they need to care about it?

This is the painful reality for these developers. The average buyer doesn't want a distribution, they want a complete operating system. KDE + X.Org + Linux is a cobbled together setup, Windows, MacOS X, Syllable, BeOS, etc. were and are not. That's what they expect, and it may mean that some of the smaller projects have to take on a lot of work. So be it. If you want desktop Linux to work well, and be a true replacement for Windows, then it may mean that the KDE and/or GNOME guys have to go Linux only or that another project has to be started that creates a complete and pure Linux operating system that is a "total experience and environment" rather than a collection of packages.

The difference is fundamental, not symantic. It means that the projects must be coordinated together with one vision, one plan and a goal of one end result.

I hope he writes C better than he writes English.

[porkchop_d_clown]

'cause if his code is like his blog, it's pretty bug ridden.

...multiple configurations mean diverts energies....
...even to undeserving once like...
...more about winers who complain ...

Damned, ungrateful oenophiles!