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This is sort of an interesting counterpoint to the whole "Open source forsters innovation" meme open source types love to throw out. Open source can foster inn

This is sort of an interesting counterpoint to the whole "Open source forsters innovation" meme open source types love to throw out. Open source can foster innovation, as long as ego's don't get in the way. Sadly there are a lot of ego's involved in open source. NB: I think the idea of fatelf is a very good one. Mainly for binary applications though. Which OSS guys tend to dislike.

tvon 17y ago
> Mainly for binary applications though. Which OSS guys tend to dislike. Huh?
- dlsspy 17y ago
  Where binary == closed source. Imagine a binary-only distribution of some application that runs on all hardware platforms (because we get that a lot in OS X and we used to get it on NeXTSTEP as well).
  - nailer 17y ago
    The parent's correct though - 'binary' does not mean 'binary only. They have very distinct meanings, and reading the sentence as written is confusing.
    - tvon 17y ago
      Indeed, I took it to mean that OSS guys only build from source, or something along those lines. Proprietary software uses binary formats, yes, but interchanging 'proprietary' with 'binary' is a bit confusing.
thingie 17y ago
He could write the patch, he could try it and persuade mainline kernel (and glibc and gcc, and...) developers to include it. If the feature is really that useful, he can even maintain it separately, or some Linux distribution can. All of which would be impossible with closed software. Innovation in the oss way, sadly, means, that there are lots of ideas, and most of them thrown out. Hostile reaction from kernel developers? Well, maybe it's little sad, they could trash the patch more politely or something, but eventually they have to. Fatelf adds stuff to kernel, glibc and few other parts of system without really solving much. He could try something with binfmt_misc and completely userspace, not add junk into kernel and glibc itself. (With junk I mean something unnecessary that can be done in userspace. (or not at all))
- cschwarm 17y ago
  > without really solving much On a German Linux news site (prolinux.de), a commercial Linux game developer -- Ankh2, IIRC -- once commented that they could not get their game running on about 2-3% of their customers' Linux computers, despite their best efforts. I dunno whether FatElf would have solved problems like this in the long run, but there are problems. You may not be affected but this doesn't mean others aren't.
  - thingie 17y ago
    No, I don't think it will solve this kind of problem. It can do the only thing: pack two different binaries into one file, which is also binary, and the kernel has some extra logic to choose, so it is 'transparent'. While this makes some thing easier (if you really don't know whether you want to download that strange 'i386' file or even stranger 'x86_64' file, you download one larger 'fatelf' containing both), it doesn't solve the real problems. Distributions spent quite a lot of effort to make both 32 and 64-bit binaries run on a single system. This is just a hack, nothing more. And it can make the mess even worse. Do I have x86_64 binary in this? Is there a correct elf packed somewhere? How do I know.
    - catzaa 17y ago
      > it doesn't solve the real problems. Well, it would sure make running software on a mixed cluster a lot easier. But in any case - the proliferation of package "managers" is a bigger problem. I really hope a few Linux distributions die so that we can at least have standardization in an evolutionary manner.
    - antonovka 17y ago
      This is just a hack, nothing more. Well, it is the cornerstone of Apple's highly successful and entirely transparent transition from PPC to x86, including drag-and-drop application installation/uninstallation. Couple it with Apple's compiler drivers and well-designed multi-architecture SDKs, and it becomes dead-simple to support multiple architectures and OS releases. Just build your binaries with -arch i386 -arch ppc -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk It also supports Apple's transparent selection of armv7/armv6 binaries on the iPhone 3GS. I'd say it's pretty useful, and not really a hack at all. The only arguments I've heard against it involve package managers and shell scripts, which demonstrates such a remarkable lack of understanding of ease of use and user behavior that I don't even know where to start, other than to say: This is why popular adoption of Linux on the desktop is not going to happen any time soon.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
davidw 17y ago
I think it has more to do with one open source project in particular, the kernel, which has a lot of history. The one time I tried to get a patch in, it was very difficult and I ultimately let it be, despite people regularly saying they thought it was a sensible idea. Indeed, there was never any real technical opposition, just a sort of inertia to ignore stuff.
jdminhbg 17y ago
I don't think this is specific to open source; anyone who's worked at a closed-source company can certainly tell the same story about stuff being quashed by egos higher-up. At least in the open source community, if you feel strongly enough, you can fork it and go off without the egos.
shpxnvz 17y ago
This is sort of an interesting counterpoint to the whole "Open source forsters innovation" meme open source types love to throw out. I may be missing something, but it seems to be fostering innovation in this example as well. He has managed to create something that at least a few people consider innovative, thanks in part to the open licenses of the sources this work is built on, and he is free to distribute it however he likes. Or are you arguing that it's not innovation unless some other group can be forced to take up work on your behalf, by merging and/or maintaining code they don't want or agree with?

tvon 17y ago

> Mainly for binary applications though. Which OSS guys tend to dislike. Huh?

dlsspy 17y ago
Where binary == closed source. Imagine a binary-only distribution of some application that runs on all hardware platforms (because we get that a lot in OS X and we used to get it on NeXTSTEP as well).
- nailer 17y ago
  The parent's correct though - 'binary' does not mean 'binary only. They have very distinct meanings, and reading the sentence as written is confusing.
  - tvon 17y ago
    Indeed, I took it to mean that OSS guys only build from source, or something along those lines. Proprietary software uses binary formats, yes, but interchanging 'proprietary' with 'binary' is a bit confusing.

thingie 17y ago

He could write the patch, he could try it and persuade mainline kernel (and glibc and gcc, and...) developers to include it. If the feature is really that useful, he can even maintain it separately, or some Linux distribution can. All of which would be impossible with closed software. Innovation in the oss way, sadly, means, that there are lots of ideas, and most of them thrown out. Hostile reaction from kernel developers? Well, maybe it's little sad, they could trash the patch more politely or something, but eventually they have to. Fatelf adds stuff to kernel, glibc and few other parts of system without really solving much. He could try something with binfmt_misc and completely userspace, not add junk into kernel and glibc itself. (With junk I mean something unnecessary that can be done in userspace. (or not at all))

cschwarm 17y ago
> without really solving much On a German Linux news site (prolinux.de), a commercial Linux game developer -- Ankh2, IIRC -- once commented that they could not get their game running on about 2-3% of their customers' Linux computers, despite their best efforts. I dunno whether FatElf would have solved problems like this in the long run, but there are problems. You may not be affected but this doesn't mean others aren't.
- thingie 17y ago
  No, I don't think it will solve this kind of problem. It can do the only thing: pack two different binaries into one file, which is also binary, and the kernel has some extra logic to choose, so it is 'transparent'. While this makes some thing easier (if you really don't know whether you want to download that strange 'i386' file or even stranger 'x86_64' file, you download one larger 'fatelf' containing both), it doesn't solve the real problems. Distributions spent quite a lot of effort to make both 32 and 64-bit binaries run on a single system. This is just a hack, nothing more. And it can make the mess even worse. Do I have x86_64 binary in this? Is there a correct elf packed somewhere? How do I know.
  - catzaa 17y ago
    > it doesn't solve the real problems. Well, it would sure make running software on a mixed cluster a lot easier. But in any case - the proliferation of package "managers" is a bigger problem. I really hope a few Linux distributions die so that we can at least have standardization in an evolutionary manner.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    This is just a hack, nothing more. Well, it is the cornerstone of Apple's highly successful and entirely transparent transition from PPC to x86, including drag-and-drop application installation/uninstallation. Couple it with Apple's compiler drivers and well-designed multi-architecture SDKs, and it becomes dead-simple to support multiple architectures and OS releases. Just build your binaries with -arch i386 -arch ppc -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk It also supports Apple's transparent selection of armv7/armv6 binaries on the iPhone 3GS. I'd say it's pretty useful, and not really a hack at all. The only arguments I've heard against it involve package managers and shell scripts, which demonstrates such a remarkable lack of understanding of ease of use and user behavior that I don't even know where to start, other than to say: This is why popular adoption of Linux on the desktop is not going to happen any time soon.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

davidw 17y ago

I think it has more to do with one open source project in particular, the kernel, which has a lot of history. The one time I tried to get a patch in, it was very difficult and I ultimately let it be, despite people regularly saying they thought it was a sensible idea. Indeed, there was never any real technical opposition, just a sort of inertia to ignore stuff.

jdminhbg 17y ago

I don't think this is specific to open source; anyone who's worked at a closed-source company can certainly tell the same story about stuff being quashed by egos higher-up. At least in the open source community, if you feel strongly enough, you can fork it and go off without the egos.

shpxnvz 17y ago

This is sort of an interesting counterpoint to the whole "Open source forsters innovation" meme open source types love to throw out. I may be missing something, but it seems to be fostering innovation in this example as well. He has managed to create something that at least a few people consider innovative, thanks in part to the open licenses of the sources this work is built on, and he is free to distribute it however he likes. Or are you arguing that it's not innovation unless some other group can be forced to take up work on your behalf, by merging and/or maintaining code they don't want or agree with?