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Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience



On Aug 5, 2009, at 6:57 AM, Sotaro Kobayashi wrote:

Yes, I agree now.

When I joined a Mr. Richard Stallman - rms' s open lecture at conference with several distribution of Novel, RH, Debian,Mandriva sevaral years ago,
I unfortunately could not hear his opinion about the situation.

If we could have an opportunity to meet him,
we really want to hear his opinion and GNU / GPL policy about this.

I do not actually…
But returning to the argument that software shouldn't support private monopolies. Intel got charged in Europe with monopoly abuse, hence Intel processors shouldn't be supported as well? Which leaves only AMD-, VIA-and Power-processors. I've never used the VIA but afaik they are not really in wide use w/ personal computer. PowerPCs aren't in use on PCs anymore since Apple dumped them (we could count in the PS3?) Thus AMD-processors would be the only major processor supported in linux-desktop-distributions which would give them kind of monopoly- power. I don't think that "software shouldn't support private monopolies" works in a market w/ such high market entry barriers. Btw. doesn't VIA and Intel have embedded chips as well but they just aren't very succesful (especially in the cell phone-market)? I remember a lot of PDAs having Intel-processors and there was a rumor that the iPhone might switch to an embedded Intel-processor in the future.

Niels

Edward Middleton wrote:
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

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