>A few years ago everybody and their brother were deriding Microsoft for pushing hacks into Windows XP to remain backward compatible with selected application -- like memory allocation workaround for the SimCity game. They did unsound engineering for business reasons -- increasing adoption rate of Windows XP. Now don't ask us to backpedal on that, and push bug compatibility into opensourece software. Don't ask for cart before the horse -- Flash Player before any non-buggy program. Don't ask Linux to follow in every footstep of Microsoft -- let's learn from mistakes.
You do realize that the reason MS was derided for that is because MS doesn't believe in backwards compatibility at all, right? They updated their API completely, which broke Simcity, then they went and added hacks to make it run. They had two more correct options. Either tell Maxis that it's their problem and that they needed to fix it, or actually maintain backwards compatibility.
Linux strives to maintain backwards compatibility, unless they absolutely must break it. This means that you maintain buggy behavior if it's used commonly. I work on multiplatform code, and moving to new Linux versions is almost trivially simple for us-99% of the time, we just have to turn on the new compiler and OS combination, and just build it. Most of the time, any actual porting efforts are done because there are new OS features that we can leverage for performance.
You have completely misstated the problem with SimCity.
"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows"
You do realize that the reason MS was derided for that is because MS doesn't believe in backwards compatibility at all, right? They updated their API completely, which broke Simcity, then they went and added hacks to make it run. They had two more correct options. Either tell Maxis that it's their problem and that they needed to fix it, or actually maintain backwards compatibility.
Linux strives to maintain backwards compatibility, unless they absolutely must break it. This means that you maintain buggy behavior if it's used commonly. I work on multiplatform code, and moving to new Linux versions is almost trivially simple for us-99% of the time, we just have to turn on the new compiler and OS combination, and just build it. Most of the time, any actual porting efforts are done because there are new OS features that we can leverage for performance.