"Thorpe voiced his displeasure with both the Linux
library loader and the open source community in his post. (See
Resources for a link.) Thorpe's message struck me as simply being
wrong-headed. For one thing, his complaints about a "bug" and the
open source community's lack of concern sound more like whining and
excuses for a problem in Kylix. For another, his remarks don't
build community, they polarize communities.
Thorpe's first complaint is that the loader doesn't report
return codes reflecting the results of library initialization to
the calling program. Borland didn't know that when they wrote
Kylix. They assumed that it did. Now that they have found out that
loader Linux uses behaves differently than Windows does, they
pronounce it a bug.
Not being familiar with the code in question, I decided to ask
some open source/free software luminaties their opinions on the
issue. Is Thorpe's complaint really a bug in the loader. Is the
loader working as it is supposed to work? I also asked for
suggestions for alternatives. Thorpe posited that Borland's only
option is to wait and hope that some day the open source
maintainers make it happen. Here is what they had to say."
