why Linux users should care [LWN.net]

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:40 UTC (Wed) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: why Linux users should care by fuhchee
Parent article: MinGW and why Linux users should care

You could read the article and it would explain that to you.

to post comments

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:57 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (5 responses)

I did read it. The closest thing seems to be this tidbit:

Why should free software developers care about MinGW? Does it do anything for them?
Richard: There's been some opposition, along the lines of "why are we helping Windows?". [...]

But that's a redirection that is not responsive to the question. That really just argues that we need not care about whether this helps windows or not.

Dan: The libvirt project started off with a strong Linux focus due to our immediate needs for a management API for Xen in Fedora and later RHEL-5. Over time the community has contributed patches to improve our portability to non-Linux platforms, [...]

I read this as claiming that the code's portability is improved when, er, it is ported. OK, but again what does that do for linux users?

Or maybe I just missed a material argument somewhere else in the interview. Please help me by pointing it out.

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:10 UTC (Wed) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe you could read more of the article. For example:

Bringing open APIs, apps and file formats to Windows users is important: It's important to Windows users because it breaks their lock-in and makes switching to a fully free platform easier down the road. It's important for [Linux developers], because your potential audience of users will increase by a factor of 10x or 20x.

Anything which increases the user and developer base, and brings in future Linux users, is good for Linux users and developers now. If you're a Linux developer forced to write software for Windows it's good too because you don't need to leave the Linux environment to use this cross- compiler.

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 20, 2008 0:03 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

I can imagine it would work for specialized (e.g. scientific) applications, where potential users are experts in the problem area and can express their ideas in writing in a concise way.

As for general purpose applications (e.g. DVD burners, file managers etc), Windows users would probably only drain time of the developers without contributing back ideas and fixes. That could slow down or even halt the development, thus inconveniencing the existing users.

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 20, 2008 14:09 UTC (Thu) by chsnyder (guest, #52714) [Link]

Yes. Portable software (works the same across all platforms) breaks down barriers to entry for potential Linux users. Firfox, VLC, Thunderbird -- these look and feel the same across all platforms, and it's a HUGE deal.

It means that when a Windows user tries Linux, she can appreciate the performance and usability improvements without having to re-learn how to use her applications. It means that when you leave your Windows computer at work, and fire up your Linux laptop at home, you can use the same apps, the same documents, and even the same preferences.

To put it another way, anything that makes it easier to write portable code makes it more likely to be developed first in Linux, and then ported to other OSes. That is extremely good news for Linux users.

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:22 UTC (Wed) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link] (1 responses)

First, the title of the article would probably be better phrased as 'why open source users should care' rather than 'why Linux users should care'. I happen to use Linux for everything I do, but furthering open source software is my primary motivation.

The primary scenario faced is people evaluating whether to deploy a Xen/KVM Linux virtualization host vs a VMWare / Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization host. A common requirement is to be able to manage the virtualization host from a non-Linux client machine, Windows being very common, OS-X to a lesser extent. If a libvirt client were not available for Windows, then VMWare or Hyper-V would be chosen pretty much by default, instead of Linux. So providing Windows client binaries helps Linux adoption, which long terms helps all Linux & open source users. As a developer though I do not wish to use Windows myself, so using a cross-compiler like MinGW allows provision of Windows client binaries to help adoption of Linux virtualization, without requiring actual use of Windows on the part of the developer.

As a second scenario, there are developers who use Windows, but who value open source & wish to contribute to the project. By enabling use of libvirt (& other related apps & libraries) on Windows, it enables a larger pool of developers to become contributors to the project, beyond just Linux based developers. These developers will contribute new features, some of which help all users regardless of their host OS.

Addressing the last point raised, portability helps Linux users by identifying code which relies on undefined behaviour which "just happens" to currently work on Linux. As an example, printf() and the %s format specifier will happily accept NULL with GLibC, printing out '(null)'. This isn't true of other OS' implementation of printf(), so porting to Windows can identify this problem & result in a fix to the main codebase. It then turns out that even on Linux, passing a NULL to printf can cause crashes with certain optimizations the compiler may make - eg converting printf("%s", foo) to puts(foo). So, a porting to Windows identified & helped fix a problem which was lieing dormant during most use on Linux, but could ultimately still affect Linux. This is a little contrived, but the general point is to identify code which relies on undefined behaviour and only works on Linux by luck rather than design.

why Linux users should care

Posted Nov 20, 2008 0:19 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

This is a little contrived, but the general point is to identify code which relies on undefined behaviour and only works on Linux by luck rather than design.

Cross-compiling per se will do very little to help with that. You'd actually have to test running the code on your targets, at which point you might as well run a native toolchain so as to get even more diversity.