“How do the Linux community and vendors balance diversity and
conformity?…”
“Commercial software vendors have a legitimate beef with the
current state of Linux. There are three ways to build an
application that runs on multiple distributions of Linux, none of
them particularly smooth….”
“Developers have tried each of these routes, and none has proven
to be particularly appealing. Each has significant pitfalls of both
cost and reputation within the community.”
“There are many reasons you don’t see a lot of commercial
application software for Linux, but I have to put the lack of a
single porting standard near the top. In my view, it even impedes
the progress of open source software. The effort spent porting code
and packages to multiple distributions is effort that could — and
should — be spent making the packages themselves better.”