Linux and the 'clssic' computing world

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 10:18:51AM +0200, Sijmen J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> It's especially frustrating when, after having put in the work, projects
> refuse even trivial patches for Solaris and derrivatives or sometimes even
> BSDs because 'who uses that anyway'. (I include the patches in pkgsrc
> instead.)

Solaris is owned by Oracle, a bunch of litigious bastards who readily
freeload off Linux and other Open Source projects but are rather reluctant
to give back much beyond gateway drugs to their closed-source offerings. I
note the existence of CDDL which appears deliberately designed to clash with
the GPL. That sort of thing can leave a nasty taste in the mouth.

The specific details differ, but this basically also applies to Microsoft
and Windows.

Anyway, this hypothetical patch submitter has apparently put in minimal
effort ("trivial patches") and now implicitly expects the project maintainer
to integrate it immediately, and then do the thankless task of maintaining
and testing it indefinitely on (multiple releases of) a closed-source
platform which is actively hostile to their work. For free, presumably.

To a rough approximation, nobody uses Solaris. It's not a good use of any
developer's time to support it unless they're being paid to do so.