I'm not an expert in this field so maybe I'm missing some important context here, but this idea of preventing people from porting your software seems odd. Who cares if people make shitty ports? If they're not good then no one will use them. The whole thing also reads a little bit condescending. Any time there's some popular public API, people will copy other people's projects built around this API and make them "bett…
Yes, Linux tracing.
I entered in 2014 when there were 14 different tracers, none of them finished (ie, does everything and works on all distros). It wasn't a lack of engineers -- there are plenty of smart engineers in tracing. But they were scattered among those 14 tracers. It was a mess, and no one could understand why Linux didn't have a mature tracing solution. (I think this also answers your question: Why cares if people make shitty ports?)
So I started thinking I could fix it by creating my own 15th tracer...Just kidding! What a terrible idea. Instead I joined one of those 14 existing tracers (a new one called BPF) and worked hard to get others on board, and do what we hadn't done well before -- collaborate!
Early on I wanted to do my own front-end, but Alexei convinced me to collaborate on bcc. I also wanted to do my own language, but got people to collaborate on the existing bpftrace instead.
The entire journey of BPF observability has been one of us choosing NOT to keep spinning up competing projects and instead to collaborate together on one. And that's how we succeeded in delivering a tracer that does everything on all distros.
I should add you might be missing a bit of context here too, and that's that tracing is maintenance heavy: You don't develop it once and then it works forever. It needs constant updates to match kernel changes etc.