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."

Java?

[Lingur]

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?

Minorities make life so ... complicated ...

[dist_morph]

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.

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - Sorry about that, our bad.

-- Sun Microsystems

Re:Portable code is robust code

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Tramiel, is that you?

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I cannot read English.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well that's why God invented Java...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!