From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] capability-based design (Re: permissions idea) In-Reply-To: <20011005053113.DF809199B5@mail.cse.psu.edu> References: <20011005053113.DF809199B5@mail.cse.psu.edu> From: Richard Message-Id: Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 00:40:45 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: fdfefc70-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 nigel@9fs.org writes: >>> also, EROS's GPLed. I do not say that is an improvement, but >>> a GPLed OS has done very well lately in popularity. > >This is a bit self-fulfilling isn't it? How many GPL'ed OSes are there >thay haven't become popular? We don't know, because they haven't >become popular enough to get publicised. there are many GPLed OSes, but most are written by teenagers or young men with little education or experience. among GPLed OSes with competent designers and implementors, the success rate compared with proprietary OSes is rather good. note that almost all proprietary OSes have educated and experienced designers and implementors. I am thinking also about the abandonment of AmigaOS, OS/2 and (probably) BeOS. it must be frustrating to have written software for one of those once-popular platforms only to see the owner of the platform let it die. I speculate that proprietary OSes need to attract 10s of millions of users or their owners let them die, but that open source OSes can survive for decades with much fewer users. the "fitness landscape" for OSes is quite harsh and severe because of numerous "network effects". "network effect" is a term from economics that every computerist should understand.