Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux?
Many moons ago, one of the things I did was to port the Windows version of Google Earth to both Mac and Linux. I did the mac first, which was onerous, because of all the work involved in abstracting away system specific API's, but once that was done, I thought Linux would be a lesser task, and we hired a great linux guy to help with that.<p>Turns out, while getting it running on linux was totally doable, getting it distributed was a completely different story. Due to IP reasons, this can't ship as code, so we need to ship binaries. How do you do that? Do you maintain a few separate versions for a few popular distributions? Do you target the Linux Standard Base? The first approach is a lot of work, and suffers from breakages from time to time, and you alienate users not on your list of supported distros. The second version, using LSB, was worse, as they specify ancient libraries and things like OpenGL aren't handled properly.<p>End result; management canned the Linux version because too much ongoing support work was required, and no matter what you did, you got hate mail from Gentoo users.