Re: Good bye

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Hi,

When the same program works on one version of an operating system but not on another, there's nothing to ask. The operating system has clearly failed to provide a usable interface.

We don't want stable interfaces (not quite yet, maybe in time). Windows may have more stability in this regard, but the down side is you end up stuck with bad interfaces that you cannot change due to 'compatibility' issues. Users of these interfaces then start writing there own kludgy workarounds. A mess.

Linux IMHO, has a different view. If an interface is broken don't try and live with it but fix it. If this breaks things downstream so be it, in the OSS world fixing things is not so hard. The problems are with closed sourced entities where those changing the interface cannot fix the closed source.

Lets be specifc - Most of the issues you refer to (nivida, vmware) relate to the kernel. Here developers may change some interface, but such changes are internal to the kernel, like drivers. In this case those changing the interface fix the driver so the end shot is all is still OK. They cannot do this for closed source stuff, which is why such things are disliked and distros like Fedora do not support them. A quote from Linus I recently read

"Asked by Zemlin why the Linux kernel does not have a stable device
driver application binary interface, Torvalds said, "We really,
really, really don't want one. The main reason most people want a
stable ABI [application binary interface] is so that they can have
their binary drivers and not have to give out source. They don't want
to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel.""

I for one agree and do not want the kernel developers to stop changing (improving) things just to provide a more stable interface to external closed source stuff drivers etc. If those closed source providers want to support linux, they either keep up with the kernel developers (which they could if they wanted, kernel release candidates are always available before release) or they allow their drivers to be OSS'ed and placed in the kernel, where they will be maintained 'for free'.

One day kernel development might slow down, but I don't want that to happen prematurely and for us to end up with bad interfaces.

Chris


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