Subj : Re: Synchronet vs. Mystic
To   : Nick Andre
From : Richard Falken
Date : Wed May 11 2022 03:37 pm

  Re: Re: Synchronet vs. Mystic
  By: Nick Andre to Richard Falken on Tue May 10 2022 08:41 am

 > On 10 May 22  05:17:09, Richard Falken said the following to Nick Andre:
 > 
 > RF> From the top of my head: you want the source code if you want to run the
 > RF> software on a
 > RF> POSIX compliant Operating System for which the original developer does n
 > RF> care to
 > RF> release a binary package.
 > 
 > Did Rob give specific reasons as to why he wouldn't?
 > 
 > Nick

I don't know if so.

But let's get real, even if you want to make a binary release for Linux, you
can't really make a universal one. There are distributions using non-widespread
C libraries (ie. they don't use GLIBC) and people is running Linux on so many
platforms beyond your regular x86 and X86_64 machines. Even if you released an
AppImage launcher, you would only get coverage for the popular Linux variants
(which, admitedly, would be like 90% of home users).

Then you find out users wanting to run your software on niche Operating Systems
such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Minix or Illumos or whatever have you. It is not
reasonable to ask the upstream developer to make a binary package for all of
these, and since BBSing is a hobby for software tinkerers, you are guaranteed
that somebody will want to run your BBS suite on some weird platform just to
see what happens. If the suite is open sourced you can let them have their
fun, fix and break things, without you having to do any extra work.


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