Hi, Lucretia wrote on Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 08:48:59AM +0000:
> I remember reading somewhere in the project statement that OpenBSD > aims to support as many platforms as possible. https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html Somewhere in the middle of the list of goals. The priority of that goal is lower than in NetBSD, and the "feasible" is interpreted in a stricter way. Feasible requires that at least some developers have access to fully working hardware, that regularly building *the whole system* on that hardware does not cause too much pain (cross-compiling is occasionally used for bringing a new platform up, but never for keeping an old platform alive), and it happened several times in the past that support for an old platform was abandoned because it got in the way of more modern development: security, maintainability, simplicity, and being a good general-purpose development platform matters more than running on each and every obscure hardware. > But it seems there is anti-Chinese sentiment concerning hardware. That sounds like an unfounded rumour to me, see for example: https://www.openbsd.org/loongson.html "The latest supported OpenBSD/loongson release is OpenBSD 7.4." There is also this on goals.html: Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit. That doesn't mean every decision in OpenBSD must always be 100% free of any political component; such a goal would seem strenuous and artificial and probable not even be possible to reach. On top of that, every individual developer is of course free to express their political opinions, and such opinions should not be construed as "an opinion of the project." Note that "we should support more Chinese hardware" would look like a non-technical, purely politicial goal that would seem inappropriate to me in view of goals.html. If there is hardware that a developer wants to work on, i don't see why it should matter whether it was produced in the PR of China, in Taiwan, in the U.S., or in Dronning Maud land. > Are there any Chinese developers actively working on the project? That is a completely irrelevant question. For many developers, i know where they live (at least approximately, unless they moved recently, which caused me to perform an incomplete website update just last week). But i don't care what the nationality of a developer is, and you probably know that making assumptions about nationality based on where somebody lives or what their name is is a bad idea. Living in the (People's Republic of) China might cause some practical problems for developers that developers living in some other countries don't need to worry about, but so what. There was a point in the past where developers living in the United States of America faced political restrictions regarding which work on OpenBSD they could do at home, and some travelled abroad for doing some particular kinds of work. Yours, Ingo
