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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."
I hate to break the news to Mr. Drepper, but Linux is a "minority" operating system! It's not mainstream. This isn't a troll, it's the truth.
If the goal is to replace one monopoly with another, then he would be correct. But that's not the goal folks! The phrase "word domination" is joke, and you're too stupid to get it! One of the chief attributes of Free and Open Source software is choice. But Mr. Drepper doesn't want choice. Democracy is nothing without a choice of candidates. Freedom of religion is nothing without a choice of belief. What good is freedom of speech when there's only one microphone?
I'm a longtime user and advocate of FreeBSD, and his article suggests to me that Linux cannot compete anymore with other Open Source operating systems. Is that really what he thinks? Wouldn't you Linux advocates rather Linux stand on its own merit?
What is it with Redhat that it ends up with all these arrogant people? I haven't used Redhat in six years, and with the way things are going, it will be at least six years before I even consider trying it again.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yes, because they package a truckload of upstream stuff. You know, a truckload of stuff that works.
Not just some obscure barely usable BSD lookalike base system with half working ports.
Alright now, BSD zealots, mod me into oblivion, but I've really been there. ;-)