Good bye

[Joe Feely]

>
> 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
>
>   
Thanks for your comments, Chris. Personally, I haven't much enjoyed many 
of the comments made in this thread, but I appreciate it coming round to 
something sensible (again, just my personal view, and just in case I 
missed anything I haven't read all the thread).

-- 
Joe Feely