openstack team mailing list archive

[Jorge Williams <jorge.williams@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:44 PM, Sandy Walsh wrote:
> 
> Wow, really? Is EC2 really that sporadic/chaotic? 
> 
> I have to plead ignorance because I don't know where the rubber meets the road, but that kinda surprises me.


I'm not saying that.  In fact let me say that I don't think the Windows API itself is sporadic or chaotic. I used to be a Windows dev way back in the day and I never got that impression.

The problem is that the Windows API is not open and is not really designed to be implemented by others.  The Wine folks (and the ReactOS folks) have been working really hard to implement it for a long time.  And with good reason, there are  a lot of incentives to have a free Windows compatible  OS.  The task the Wine folks have is very hard though. There are no reference implementations for the Windows API, so you can't look at the code, you have to replicate bugs in the implementation and bugs in client apps etc, oh and do you really think MS wants a free Windows compatible OS on the market? -- you have to account for them messing with you as well.

Soren was suggesting that supporting EC2 was much like writing an implementation of HTTP or SMTP (both open specs with open reference implementations).  All I'm saying is that reverse engineering a living, rapidly changing, closed system and writing another system that behaves like it exactly (bugs and all) is not the same thing as implementing an open spec -- it's harder.

-jOrGe W.

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