Eric Cartman^WRaymond Strikes Again

The Register is one of the sites covering ESRs Linux / iPod-compatibility rant and he’s managed to confuse himself, other people and the issues. Once again.

Firstly we have this request that the “community”, most of whom cringe when he starts talking, start compromising on closed source platforms and formats. Apparently the OpenSource movement hasn’t given up enough rights yet and he’d like us to back down and hand over a couple more.

He then tangents off about 64bit architectures and the desktop… Which is an odd mix to start with, all the early 64bit action will happen in the datacentre and the server room. But anyway, Linux has had better AMD64 support than Windows for years now. SuSE led the crowd (Bo Thorsen gave a couple of great 64 bit porting talks at GLLUG years ago) and his “the end of the transition to 64-bit computing by the close of 2008.” is insane. The sheer number of people still running Windows 95 is a testament to how slow the conversion process happens.

As for binary kernel drivers being a necessary compromise what can I say, I’ll side with people like Theo De Raat and RMS any day. They’ve done the legwork, written the code and actually stick to their principles. Unlike the guy who’s now most famous for a kernel build system that the kernel builders wouldn’t touch and altering the Hackers Dictionary to suit his own ego.

Bonus link: The Everybody loves Eric Raymond Cartoon.