On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 11:57:37 -0400, John Thacker wrote: > Now I'm not saying that you're arguing for going that far, but people who > like Linux because they like Free Software are not enthused about bending > over backwards to keep the non-Free stuff working. Well, speaking as somebody who has spent far too much time writing new code and hacks to work around incompatible changes in lower parts of the system, I have to say your attitude that backwards compatibility only matters for proprietary software is a little grating. Open source software isn't written by pixies you know - volunteers have to spend their evenings and weekends making changes which don't actually improve anything, they just work around changes made elsewhere. This is quite depressing work, at least for me. Sometimes it just doesn't get done. Take a look at njamd (not just another malloc debugger) some time. >From the description and documentation it looks _really_ cool, but I was never able to try it because the code is riddled with constructs that GCC no longer compiles, for instance using __FUNCTION__ as a macro. I could have installed an old GCC I guess, or I could have gone through and tried to fix the source. In fact I did for a while, until it became clear that the problems ran deeper than just that, at which point I gave up. Now, Microsoft understands that backwards compatibility is not a "feature" so much as a hard requirement of the product. It doesn't matter how cool Longhorn is, or how secure, or how fast, if when it comes out it doesn't run peoples programs. That's why they bend over backwards: because they want to sell lots of copies, and that means lots of people have got to (a) want and (b) be able to buy it. If word gets out that Longhorn breaks your programs, that'd be a marketing/PR disaster for them especially given their corporate customers. Look at the fuss caused just by Service Pack 2 for a taste of what that'd be like. thanks -mike
