> It would limit participation in development to those that can afford the
> latest and greatest hardware, significantly reducing the pool of coders, and
> as a result increase the length of the development cycle.
>
> It would result in code that would only run on the latest and greatest,
> and many things would be incorporated into the code that does not work on the
> majority of platforms but hasn't been tested, until the freeze, then you would
> have this giant mess to clean up, that at that point may not even be possible
> to clean up, lengthening the development cycle.
>
> One of the things that initially drew me towards Linux was the relatively
> large number of hardware platforms supported. Of all the things I hate about
> Windows, the fact that it runs essentially only on one platform is high on the
> list.
>
> I have to admit that I am disturbed by the influence that M$ thinking
> seems to be having on Linux as of late, new interfaces that look like M$'s
> interface, not only in the OS itself, but in the installation programs and
> interfaces shipped with the commercial distributions, and now the attitude that
> yea, just like M$, we're now going to force you to throw out your hardware and
> applications every year else you can't enjoy the latest wiz-bang gadgets.
>
> Such a move I'm afraid would result in a good deal of elitism amoungst
> those that can afford to participate, resulting in an OS that appeals to a
> snooty few who can afford the hardware to run it, and not one that appeals to a
> diverse userbase like that which presently exists.
while i'm not kernel hacker, i agree with you because of same attitude
toward more platforms and older hardware (and M$).
while it is of course broader issue i think old/other/... HW is as
important as new one: while there are many HW-cutting-edge people (like
gamers, various experimentators, ...) there are also many people with
older HW just because such HW is able to handle their problems/tasks/...
at the end i say one thing: i will happily wait one year longer for
features which wont force me to upgrade HW than get new kernel quickly and
realize i can't use it (like new "stable" 2.2 tree - don't take it as
personal attack on devlopers - i'm happy i did not deploy it on our
production servers yet).
sincerely
peter hanecak
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