[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[John L. Bass]

jbass at dmsd.com (John Bass) writes:
> While MD wasn't part of the standards process, as Chief Architect at
> SCO up until the Caldera takeover, he is respected in the UNIX community
> as a visionary and advocate for UNIX. Many of us have had long discussions
> at conferences about what need to follow UNIX, nobody has had a for-profit
> budget or research grant to actually go do it.

By the way, RMS joined the POSIX standards process as we neared finishing the
initial /usr/group standard ... and is even attributed to suggesting the name
POSIX.

Our design horizon for the standard was five to thirty years, which we are
rapidly reaching the end of. The intent was to create a stable API for application,
and it was never intended to cast in stone the UNIX OS's internal framework.
FreeBSD and Linux, did do that because it was what the students involved had
been taught in school.

Even RMS had visions of fixing some of the major architectural flaws in UNIX
with his vision of starting from scratch to produce GNU HURD. There are clearly
some advances in that work, well better than FreeBSD and Linux ... and lacking
in other areas. RMS's personality and GPL got in the way at the time and left
the project without any major corporate sponsors.

John