Open Source: Irreconcilable Differences

By Kenneth Hess

August 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
There’s a mastodon in the room and no one’s discussing it. What they are discussing is how my free, open-source operating system needs to be compatible with a certain commercial, proprietary operating system whose identity I’ll leave up to you to decipher. The conversation is taking a bad turn to such topics as portability, comprehensive inter-operating system compatibility, cooperative development and how I have to buy the next round of beer.

In my article, “Last Year’s Penguin,” I had a similar attitude against the notion of combining OpenSolaris and Linux into a single entity. I’m not implying that anyone is attempting to create a Windows/Linux hybrid—nothing of the sort. What I am saying is that too much compatibility is just as bad.

The mastodon to which I refer is the overwhelming sufficiency of existing interoperability. Allow me to clarify that little tongue twister for you. Shouldn’t interoperability between the two operating systems be enough? Why must there be compatibility between them? After all, the relationship between the two is not a match made in heaven. And, in this relationship, why must it always be my operating system that has to conform to the other? I know in any relationship there's a giver and a taker, but must the Linux community be the perennial giver for every situation?

Just once, I’d like to hear the other guys say, “Hey, maybe we should create our applications, filesystems and documents to be compatible with the open-source ones.” Instead, they develop their own standards to which we all must happily conform. Now that’s what I call a harsh mistress!

But when did any level of compatibility between the two operating systems become desirable? And where do we draw the line? If the two systems become too compatible, what we’ll have then is an ugly offspring—a Devil’s Spawn hybrid that exists between worlds but comfortable in neither. We already have an operating system that fits that description: Mac OS X. There’s enough ugly in the world without purposefully adding more.

Related Search Term(s): Linux, open source, Windows, Microsoft

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