Re: [9fans] ports from GPL

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

oh ya. i think the gnu culture was seperate from the start.
i started out by necessity. they needed to get their software
to run on all kinds of unix varients, which were highly incompatable.
and for a while it was pretty good stuff.

(for example, the infamus mt xinu tools were suffering from bit
rot when gnu tools started to become usable. for example,
xinu grep had a really short line limit. gnu grep didn't (thanks mike.)
the xinu shell was the original bourne shell, and would exit if you
hit ^C at the wrong time and had signal-related memory
issues because of its infamous memory management.)

however gnu has devolved. they seem to value compiling on anything,
and efficiency, but they don't seem to value simplicity. gcc is a good
example of how getting as far out-of-balance as gnu seems to be
can undermine one's primary goals.

- erik

On Fri Mar 17 05:35:36 CST 2006, brantley@coraid.com wrote:
> > i think that open source code has a very different outlook
> > on the world than plan 9. it's very hard (and frustrating) to
> > deal with the culture clash when porting.
>
> That brings to mind something that I've been thinking about for a
> couple of years.  In watching the stuff in Linux and poking around the
> simulators and old code, I can see at least three different cultures.
> Murry Hill (Bell Labs), 545 Technology Sq (MIT), and Berkeley.  These
> cultures have belief systems that are mutually exclusive.  And there
> must be subcultures as well.  The socket interface, for example, is
> really MIT culture thru BBN to BSD.
>
> Anyone else see this?  More cultures?
>
>