On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> wrote: > In my experience anyone distributing binaries actually picks a small > set of distros and builds for those explicitly, rather than relying > on the LSB. Does that mean that it's not actually useful in the real > world? I guess in a sense this posting is to the wrong lists; we're > all free software people here who have little use for the LSB. Where > do the proprietary software distributors hang out :-)
the proprietary software distributors hang out around USA lawyer offices, where they get advice on how to perform tivoisation without anybody noticing. they then ship TVs and even 3G modems with embedded linux kernels and custom OSes... and nobody notices. my take on this is that ARM is still just emerging from the "uselessness" of sub-600mhz ARM9s and ARM11s as far as general-purpose computing is concerned [laptop / desktop etc. *not* true embedded purposes obviously: don't get upset, ARM employees, because "mr LKCL said your processors were quotes useless quotes" - read it again: it's a *conditional* description]. also, the sheer diversity of SoCs plays directly, psychologically, against anyone "joining forces" on things like LSB. thus the majority of proprietary software distributors up until recently have been doing custom-built from scratch software stacks [using e.g. buildroot, openembedded] and thus LSB was and still is completely useless to them. even android is custom-built, and everything (except the highly-optimised apps - for ARM - which are becoming more common) is a java app. that having been said, 500mhz+ Dual-Core Cortex A9s already out which knock the stuffing out of 1.6ghz Intel Atoms (yes, saw the youtube video) mean that could just be about to change, completely. sooo... although the situation *right now* is that nobody in the commercial world is the slightest bit interested in LSB because they all do "custom builds" of complete software stacks, it could be said that *if* the free software community just dropped ready-to-go LSB standards in front of their noses, they'd quite likely use it. you have to remember that the majority of these companies could not put two lines of code together to save their lives. they literally have to be spoon-fed (in some cases even to the point of being told where to put the screws, let alone the software). they are usually spoon-fed by the CPU manufacturer [and in the case of MStar Semi, they won't even let *you* violate the GPL, they do it entirely for you]. so in that regard, i think it's more a case of "if the free software community provides LSB across ARM, it'll get used". so in _that_ regard, the question becomes: "are the efforts of the free software community better off being spent elsewhere"? and "what benefit is there *TO THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY* of doing LSB for ARM"? forget the proprietary junkies, they'll suck anything from us that moves and not give a dime in return. l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/banlktimigcu991spdornpbh0zbnut+n...@mail.gmail.com
