29 Aug
2011
29 Aug
'11
10:26 a.m.
On 08/29/2011 12:09 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
I'm sorry Al, but I have to disagree here. It's pretty rare for
device support to be removed from the Linux kernel distribution. There
are even ARCnet card drivers still in there.
I do not have
complete faith about this in the long term. The open
source folks tend to be a loose group of undisciplined volunteers,
generally not long term thinkers, with only a very small segment
interested in historic preservation.
Who toss legacy hardware support at an alarming rate because it's too much
work. Linux is an extreme example of this. NetBSD pretty much the opposite. I don't know how far back they ever found it, but
Stallman/FSF were hunting
for GNU distributions because they didn't have a complete archive of what
they had released.
And I have to respectfully disagree here, too. Yes, this did happen,
but it was because the only server on which those old distributions were
archived was cracked by dirtbags, and the archives were tainted. Yes,
this does argue for better backups, redundancy, etc, but the loss of
those distributions wasn't for the reasons you imply.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL