Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience

[Niels Kobschätzki <n.kobschaetzki@example.com>]

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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