Re: Is Linux Unix?
> Good! Please tell Intel that it's easy to write a compiler to run on all
> major brands of Unixes. A single person can do that. Why can't Intel? I
> can't verify how correct your statement is. I don't know exactly how much
> effort went into emacs to make it portable, exactly how difficult to write
> a compiler is, etc. I may be wrong in saying the efforts to make emacs
> portable were huge. But, if it's so easy to write a portable code, why
> doesn't Intel do that? I'm not asking Intel to support all Unixes. I'm
> merely asking to support all Linuxes. Why don't they do that if it's so
> easy?
>
> I thought that it was because each distribution of Linux is a little bit
> different from each other and this makes writing a portable code
> non-trivial. But, many people here in this discussion group seem to be in a
> different opinion. Writing a portable code is easy. Intel doesn't write
> portable code because . . . ., why? Perhaps because of sheer laziness? I
> think they will be happy if their compiler runs on Debian, SuSE, etc. I
> don't think they gain anything by deliberately excluding other brands of
> Linux than RedHat. I don't think of any other reason why they don't want to
> support Debian than that that would incur significant cost which they don't
> want to pay.
>
I believe that whatever additional costs of supporting more distributions are,
they are inconsequential to Intel. Their decision to support only RedHat is
purely marketing/business-driven, not technology-driven. They see RedHat as a
business partner that has HP, IBM, Dell etc. as customers. Intel does not see
Debian as such a partner, for obvious reasons. It's in Intel's interests to
steer more people from community distributions to RedHat. That's business...
Cheers,
Peter O
www.dialore.com
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