That's an interesting take. It seems like a modern slant on the old trope of "all the world's a VAX", then "who cares if it's not i386?", and now, "of course it's portable - we support both kinds - amd64 AND aarch64".<p>But it's a bit disingenuous. Are developers being overwhelmed by problem reports for things that hardly matter? Looking at NetBSD's pkgsrc, which supports more OSes than just NetBSD, we see about 64,000 patch files for about 26,000 packages. While many packages don't require any patches, some require many.<p>This is because for many programs, upstream just don't care. It's not just about odd architectures - they just don't care about NetBSD support, or support for different, alternative OSes. Perhaps that's fine, but consider this - the patches already exist and are tested, and they're maintained in pkgsrc.<p>There are times people become indignant about being told how to fix their software for use under systems other than Windows, common Linux and macOS, on CPUs other than amd64 and aarch64. Yes, indignant. Some Python folks don't want to consider anyone would want to use Python on systems (like embedded) that don't have full IEEE floating point emulation. postgresql would rather mark platforms as broken than just let them compile the standard c portions of their code.<p>People like to say, "they don't want to spend the time and energy", as if it adds work. No - there are examples where people choose the broken path when the not broken path is just as easy if not easier. Nobody is obligated to add or patch anything, even if the patches are freely given and well tested. But the fact that some people actively fight against portability is disturbing, and should be viewed with suspicion.<p>The author of the article seems to have forgotten some history. They mention downsides of the c ecosystem, like the lack of standardized ways to build, the lack of consistent package management, and so on. But in every instance where those things have been imposed, the imposition has been problematic, has it not? Have we not seen security issues with PyPi? Have we not seen the dependency hell which is Ruby?<p>The point is that nobody can tell anybody else how to do open source, so we'll always have a hundred different ways to do things. We also can't help that some people will be gatekeepers. But we personally can ignore the gatekeepers and help make things portable.<p>Making excuses for why portability is somehow extra work is only encouraging gatekeeping. We don't need to do that - gatekeepers already have enough energy on their own.