deploying free software on proprietary OSs [LWN.net]

deploying free software on proprietary OSs

Posted Mar 23, 2010 20:36 UTC (Tue) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: Perhaps hubris is not a good programmer characteristic. by ejr
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

  [...] some of us also need to deploy on proprietary systems.

That is fine and can still be done - but i hope you will understand that it would be a mistake to make our development process worse, just to accommodate deployment on proprietary systems some more.

By that argument we should also all develop on Windows, as that would make deployment on proprietary systems even easier, right?

I quite fundamentally disagree with that line of argument: keeping our development model sub-optimal just to accommodate proprietary OS's clearly hurts free software in the long run.

Thanks, Ingo.

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deploying free software on proprietary OSs

Posted Mar 24, 2010 1:20 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

It's not just about non-free OSs, you'll hurt other free operating systems as well.

deploying free software on proprietary OSs

Posted Mar 24, 2010 2:22 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

oh thats just a crappy argument, why should Linux carry other free OSes?

Like its great that *BSD + OpenSolaris exist, but really shouldn't they have their own developers who contribute these sort of features to them? not wait for Linux developers to help them.

deploying free software on proprietary OSs

Posted Mar 24, 2010 3:08 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

It's not about carrying other free OSes, nobody is asking the linux developers to do any work on FreeBSD etc.. But qemu contains tons of stuff that have _nothing at all_ to do with linux. Keeping that stuff away from other OSes to make the development faster would be antisocial, and let's face it, qemu is not going to stay portable if it were to be integrated into the linux development tree.