Re: 64-bit transition deadline (Re: Etch in the hands of the Stable Release Managers)
On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 02:06:14PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 19:16:12 +0200, Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com> said:
> > On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 10:12:54AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> What are the concrete reasons, you think, for thinking that 2008 (and
> >> not earlier or later) is going to be the deadline? From the article,
> >> it seems to be mostly hand waving and pretending that the past is a
> >> perfect prologue, which is an argument I find difficulty lending any
> >> credibility to.
> > I think we agree that Moore's law predicts the available amount of
> > memory.
> Broadly. Precision, however, is not something Moore ever said
> of his statistical law, so you can't base decisions to the precision of
> months based solely on that.
Sure, and this prediction isn't something I'm planning on scheduling /my/
life around, but it's interesting to me insofar as it aligns with my own
goals for lenny, which are strongly centered on multiarch and making amd64 a
first-rate Linux platform even for legacy/binary stuff we can't port
directly.
> Secondly, these large application developers you seem to speak
> of appear to be proprietary application developers -- which mean that
> in my eyes the issue pales to insignificance. Are we talking about
> closed source software here?
Absolutely. Are you interested in how Debian competes in the market place,
or are you only interested that it remains free and useful to you
personally? Even if you're only interested in the latter, doesn't its
usefulness depend on the network effects of having other developers
interested in Debian and working on it as a project, which makes market
share relevant in any case?
In a world where a significant majority of our (current or prospective)
userbase needs closed source software in order to accomplish the things they
set out to with their computers, how Debian interfaces with such
closed-source software is of some relevance to all of us who want to see
Debian thrive, even if we choose not to use that software ourselves.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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