A discussion with Keith Packard

Posted Apr 3, 2003 9:11 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

With the current trend of Linux gaining a dominant voice, don't you think that a community driven development process could favor Linux up to the point that other OSes support becomes of inferior quality?

It's possible—but unlikely. It's been my experience that the Free Software/Open Source communities are extremely good at supporting the interests of other platforms, much more so than companies. Take, for example, the range of Unices that most prominent open source packages support, or the range of obsolete platforms that Linux or NetBSD work with.

I suspect that this is partly because most hackers find themselves in a "minority group" compared to Windows too often. It's largely because hackers believe that they should write to standards, therefore failure to cope with standards-compliant implementations is a bug. And it's partly because very few hackers started with Linux and have stayed there. Most still remember with affection their old SysV / Sun / Amiga / Mac / Atari / (whatever) systems. They're likely to view a 68030 with 6 MB of RAM with a certain amount of respect, not for what it is now, but because they remember that it once was a very desirable system.

End ESR mode.