Dude, I've done most of the CS sequence in college (majored in cognitive science). I've been a professional programmer for 25 years. I do C/C++ development currently, and once upon a time created entire games in assembly language.
I read HN, Communications of the ACM, and other technical sites and blogs to keep up on the state of the art. I designed an SDK that was used in over a hundred commercial products based entirely on its technical merits, and people have been coming to me asking to pay to license my current (not yet public) SDK, based on the merits of my last one.
I submit that since I was deceived by the statement, that it was deceptive. Period.
And as Camillo pointed out, it's frequently applied to libraries. Correctly, I might add, when those libraries are built into shared objects. The ABI [1] needs to match, for example, for them to have binary compatibility.
A good example of such libraries would be the entire set of iOS libraries that would be implied by saying "binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0."
See [2] if you don't believe me. "Binary compatibility" refers to the ability to run programs built for an OS, and not just the lowest levels of the OS, but the whole thing.
A clear title would be "Magenta: Binary compatible with Darwin (the iOS 5 kernel)." A better title might have been "Magenta: Run Darwin (iOS) binaries on top of Linux."
I read HN, Communications of the ACM, and other technical sites and blogs to keep up on the state of the art. I designed an SDK that was used in over a hundred commercial products based entirely on its technical merits, and people have been coming to me asking to pay to license my current (not yet public) SDK, based on the merits of my last one.
I submit that since I was deceived by the statement, that it was deceptive. Period.
And as Camillo pointed out, it's frequently applied to libraries. Correctly, I might add, when those libraries are built into shared objects. The ABI [1] needs to match, for example, for them to have binary compatibility.
A good example of such libraries would be the entire set of iOS libraries that would be implied by saying "binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0."
See [2] if you don't believe me. "Binary compatibility" refers to the ability to run programs built for an OS, and not just the lowest levels of the OS, but the whole thing.
A clear title would be "Magenta: Binary compatible with Darwin (the iOS 5 kernel)." A better title might have been "Magenta: Run Darwin (iOS) binaries on top of Linux."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_code_compatibility