why? Its some ideological bs that you only want to be involved with Linux.
Yes. It is ideology (which is based on the following reasoning which has to do with politics and economics and just plain ethics). I do not like people or companies who:
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Turn public knowledge into private knowledge (which is what every one of the proprietary *nix systems has done---Unix was free (not of cost but of licence restrictions) for anyone to modify/play-with/improve but these companies built proprietary code on the existing Unix base and called it Solaris/HPUX/AIX and what have you).
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Sell you hardware at high prices that ties you in to buying all upgrades from them because of proprietary interfaces; and the upgrades continue to be at even higher prices in a market where prices are falling (or quality of product is rising).
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Insist that you need to use these proprietary products to work with them. (This is effectively what SPIRES is insisting on).
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Continue to be in the market by getting users to believe they are paying extra for "quality"---such quality as they are no longer the sole providers of especially in the Indian context.
I have a choice not to work with any of the people falling under categories (a), (b), (c) or (d). I will (and will continue to) exercise that choice.
This may lead to the question as to why I am continuing to support the configuration and running of some proprietary systems "imsc", "kaveri" and "mirror". Answer: Only because I was in one way or another instrumental in their original purchase and configuration.
I do believe that IMSc has been short-changed in the purchase of "kaveri" and "mirror" though at the time it did not seem like such a bad decision.
The remaining "junk" of type (b) above like origin, darth, willow, imsc4, imsc5 and imsc6 does not interest me at all. Nor does the "junk" of type (a) like Mathematica and Matlab.
I do not seriously worry about the purchase, configuration or replacement of "junk" by more "junk"; but what can I do if some people want to be "junkies"?