Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Sotaro Kobayashi wrote:
> Edward Middleton wrote:
>   
> | Not all distributions support ARM but most of the important ones do.
>
>
> Yes, I am scared about this point.
>
> For me,
> the situation which not all importamt distributions are supporting ARM 
> seems to infringe "The right to write software unimpeded by private 
> monopolies" in GNL.
>
> Without considering hardware architecture neutrality in writing the 
> program under GNL,
> it seems to me that we need to stop using Linux on that hardware. :-(
>   

I think you have got it the wrong way round.  SuSE and Mandriva decided,
unilaterally, holding private monopolies over their respective
distributions, to not support the arm architecture.  That is their
right.   That is not to say that someone couldn't port OpenSuSE or
Mandriva to arm but that Novel and Mandriva aren't going to do it for you.

That doesn't stop a developer from writing applications that run on both
SuSE, Mandriva and any other distributions and architectures.  I would
argue that,  it improves the likelihood that developers will write
portable code by making architecture specific assumptions obvious.

If you we were talking about porting applications to arm assembler I
could see your point but the big advantage of using Linux is that most
applications don't need porting, they just need to be recompiler.  That
is the reason so many distributions supported arm so easily.

Edward