On Wed, December 8, 2004 10:44 am, Sean Middleditch said: [snip] Sean, You seem to want the entire Linux world to Just Get Along[tm] and have everyone play by the same rules so that proprietary app vendors lives would be a little easier. But there is no way to impose such a solution across the entire spectrum. The truth is, the Linux development model is messy with diverse groups of developers in a wild web of cooperation and competition. This model is incredibly powerful and has created the huge success that we have today. The fact that there are some interoperability issues is hardly surprising, but their resolution is usually not really that difficult. Nobody is _ever_ going to get all the people involved in Linux to agree to anything. The beauty of open source is, you don't have to get people to agree, you have the power to do what you want. Perhaps you'll have some luck convincing RedHat to include every library ever developed for ever. But i'm not sure the demand for it is as great as you think. Nor would it help on other distributions that refuse to implement that plan. Sticking with a long lived distribution really does minimize the problems for users. As for proprietary application vendors, the burden imposed by the Linux landscape really isn't insurmountable. They have a number of options on how to provide their products. Cheers, Sean
