[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[John L. Bass]

Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> writes:
> Cloning?  As I understand things, they were continuing development of
> something with a new direction for advancements and a particular
> philosophy toward matters of licensing and project maintenance.  That's
> not "cloning".  A fork is not a copy -- it's an evolutionary branch.

Yes, cloning ... rewriting to the POSIX standard that we (Heinz, Mike,
myself and two dozen others) started and reached concensus on a decade
earlier. When we started the /usr/group UNIX standards process which
we handed over to IEEE to become POSIX, we never expected to cast into
stone the state of operating systems. Those of us that were senior
architects well understood what was wrong with the existing design
at the time, and it largely got worse with the student clones. While
there has been some major fixes to subsystems and algorithms in the
last few years, the architectural flaws still exist, as they are
pretty cast in stone at this point.

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.

> The above is re: FreeBSD, of course, not Linux.  Linux is more of a
> "clone", at least in its inception.  Even there, however, there's
> obviously an intent to build on prior art, provide a community model of
> software maintenance, and allow licensing terms that differ from what
> came before.

It equally applies to Linux OS and major subsystems, and those flaws
are not fixed by OSS and GPL.

> We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Or, as either Mark or Mike said back in 1988, we stand on the shoulders
of Dinasours, to which we all laughed and had to agree at the time.

> > 
> > The advancement, would have been to put the energies which produced FreeBSD
> > and Linux into a next generation redesign and architecture.

> In any case, I don't see what the big problem is.  The parts of Unix
> design philosophy that work well should not be eliminated just for some
> kind of ideological devotion to the idea of "advancement".  Meanwhile, a
> lot of the new stuff showing up in projects like Plan 9 is being actively
> incorporated into Unix-like OSes such as FreeBSD.

Sorry, but Plan 9 is one of the Dinasours too.

> In other words, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.  If I *was*
> inclined to throw the baby out, I wouldn't pick up MS Windows or MacOS X
> as the shining example of new technologies.

Nor would we, but pick and choose from a few parts as inspiration.

John