On Sun, 15 Feb 2026, 11:06 Jeffrey Walton, <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Feb 15, 2026 at 5:38 AM Jonathan Wakely <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Quoting from >> https://blog.yossarian.net/2021/02/28/Weird-architectures-werent-supported-to-begin-with >> >> *Give up on weird ISAs and platforms* >> >> I put this one last because it’s flippant, but it’s maybe the most >> important one: outside of hobbyists playing with weird architectures for >> fun (and accepting the overwhelming likelihood that most projects won’t >> immediately work for them), open source groups should not be >> unconditionally supporting the ecosystem for a large corporation’s hardware >> and/or platforms. >> >> Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography >> actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be >> forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to >> fix it themselves. No free work for platforms that only corporations are >> using. No, this doesn’t violate the open-source ethos; nothing about OSS >> says that you have to bend over backwards to support a corporate platform >> that you didn’t care about in the first place. >> >>> > So, it looks like the argument from ENOSUCHBLOG is, maintainers of free > software should not work for free (as in cash), instead, a company should > pay for the work. > There's more than one way to pay for the work. The most obvious is simply assigning their own employees to do the work. > I like the idea, but I don't think it is a good argument. It might even > be a strawman. First, most of the work is already being done at no charge > for other platforms and operating systems. A port to new hardware is > usually an incremental milestone, not a monumental leap. > > Second, most free software developers are not motivated by money. [0,1] > > Third, would the project set up the necessary corporate structures to > handle money like contributions and payments to the project and developers? > That's not necessary. Paul's original statement was "but I suppose if IBM doesn't care enough to make that compiler easily available then free-software maintainers shouldn't care enough to port to it." And you're arguing ... what exactly? That he's wrong, and free software maintainers should be responsible for doing that themselves, for no compensation, because ... it's easy to do that porting, and difficult to set up a way to accept payment for the work? Again, I very clearly said that maintainers are obviously able to do that work if they choose to, for whatever motivates them to do so. But there should be no obligation or expectation that they do it.
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