Oh yeah, the secret so deep, the secret so hidden, the secret so unbelievable… that everyone knows about it.

Posted Jan 20, 2012 4:33 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: Oh yeah, the secret so deep, the secret so hidden, the secret so unbelievable… that everyone knows about it. by khim
Parent article: SFLC: Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices

> Well, he's right: developers make or break your platform. And developers want stability. Not UI stability, but ABI stability. They want to create binaries once and sell them for a long, long, time. What they absolutely don't want to do is to keep few versions of them, recompile them for all existing distributions, etc.

So very, very true. I'd argue this extends beyond the library ABIs as well, of course, to things like the software installers. It's still very frustrating that a developer has to build like 50 packages of the same application for major distros on the Linux desktop.

FOSS is nice and all, but regular people want to just be able to click and go without needing to dick around with building source, and regular developers don't want to have to spend their time working around a broken distribution platform and breaking ABIs.