Re: porting troubles
On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Sergio Brandano wrote:
> Out of blue, why is that Linux now runs stable on six (6) different
Only 6? :-)
> platforms but commercial software like Star, Corel, Adobe and IBM,
> just to mention a few, are only available for ix86? Are there any
> political or technical reasons for it?
There are several reasons:
- Most people think Linux == ia32
- Most people think Linux == Red Hat
- The market share for non-ia32 Linux is too small to justify the work
- Commercial software is not endian-clean or not signed/unsigned char-clean
And only the last one is technical...
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
Reply to: