-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 10:54 , William H. Magill wrote:
> I normally work with Tru64 Unix on Alpha and with Alpha Linux, > and I can > say without qualms that the Open Source community simply does > not support > anything but Sparc or Intel. That's a little unfair. For example, if there was no open source support for Alpha, there'd be no Alpha Linux. I suspect it's far more correct to say that open source *developers* don't actively support any hardware that the don't personally have access to, and unfortunately Alpha boxes are far less common than Intel boxes. > And it simply cannot deal with the idea of a > 64bit clean environment. Same argument applies. > It takes exceptional work by a very small cadre of very > dedicated people to > provide all of the ports to all of the other platforms that exist. > That any Open Source software exists at all for non-Sparc and non-Intel > platforms is a minor miracle. What you've just described is the essence of open source. I write some code, think it might be useful to others, and throw it out there for the world to use. I'm pleased if it can be used on architectures other than what I use, and I'll accept patches for other architectures if they don't break the code for mine, but I don't consider it my responsibility to ensure that my code works on every platform known to man. That's why I open sourced it. Want more open source software ported to Alpha? Ship me an Alpha box. You'll get it sooner if you can pay me a full-time salary as well. :-) - -- Craig S. Cottingham [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP key available from: <http://pgp.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA2FFBE41> ID=0xA2FFBE41, fingerprint=6AA8 2E28 2404 8A95 B8FC 7EFC 136F 0CEF A2FF BE41 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (Darwin) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8zWT2E28M76L/vkERAorXAJ0TuquL4J6rK2qkj3LNjb3wn1ynBACfSKpj WKavFlcbW7wa12GvDI40BeM= =jkBp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
