Ulrich Drepper seems to think that the burden for supporting "irrelevant" architectures and proprietary systems is too great, so paring support to the bone will help the open source community increase adoption.
There is no need to develop on those proprietary or irrelevant systems anymore. It does not further the cause of free software.
That is a very short-sighted view. Corporate America is not going to succumb to the views of a bunch of open source extremists and suddenly through out all their AIX software and hardware, thrilled to be moving to Linux. The open source world has to show value. The best way to do that is incrementally. If apache only ran on linux, would it have nearly the adoption it does? No way. It would be a niche player instead of one of the dominant ones.
Things like Apache, MySQL, etc. are the gateway drugs for corporations into the open source world. The "all or nothing" view is going to force them right into "nothing."
There is a valid point within this article; that balancing support for older and increasingly obsolete architectures is probably done better by a seperate project of people who are in a position to test and validate these darker corners. I think that's going to get lost in the flames over the the broader calls to action.
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