Nicholas? [LWN.net]

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 15:27 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786)
In reply to: Nicholas? by matthew_parry@hotmail.com
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

Since when exactly an attempt to port an operating system to a new hardware platform became a bad thing?

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Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 17:13 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

When it diverts resources from the project, adds hardware costs, and detracts from the original goal of a cheap, reliable product which can be modified by the users.

Now if your goal is to cripple a cheap product in order to make your expensive inferior product more viable, then by all means, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 17:50 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the resources diverted were people answering questions and documenting things so that the microsoft engineers could figure out how to do things.

such documentation is good for opensource developers as well.

as far as adding hardware cost, the claim I've seen is that the SD card slot was added for this purpose, but from what I've heard the extent of that hardware change was altering the plastic and adding a socket that was wired to existing chips. hardly a make-or-break item.

and for now the SD card slot is necessary to run many linux distros as well (including Fedora), so it's existence is good for opensource as well.

the biggest hardware change from the initial specs was the change from 128M to 256M of ram, and that wasn't done for microsoft, it was done because firefox became too bloated to run acceptably with the smaller memory. that change cost a _lot_ more than the SD card slot.