Re: [9fans] capability-based design (Re: permissions idea)

[Richard <greon@best.com>]

nigel@9fs.org writes:
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>>> the success rate compared with
>>> proprietary OSes is rather good.  note that almost all proprietary
>>> OSes have educated and experienced designers and implementors.
>>>
>I've a feeling that for every GPL'ed OS you can name which is successful,
>I can name several non-GPL'ed ones. In fact, I can only think of one
>successful GPLed OS...

Right, but my argument is as follows.

EROS has an educated, experienced writer.  Thus, to understand
EROS's chances of becoming popular, we can ignore OSes written by,
eg, arrogant teenage boys.

There have been many hundreds of proprietary OSes written last 30 years
(more in the early part of that period, since markets have
consolidated).  Just proprietary forks off of BSD there might have been
as many as 100.  Then there's dozens of OSes that came out of the PC
revolution of 1976-1983.  Most have educated, experienced writers (ok,
not the early PC OSes, but the others).  100s have had development
budgets in the millions (again, mostly during the early half of the
period).  OS/2's development budget was 3 billion.

The amount of development effort, measured in man hours times
competence, say, that has gone into proprietary OSes is much greater
than the amount that has gone into GPLed OSes.

Of course there has been only one very successful GPLed OS.  But it is
pretty clear from reading the Linux kernel developers that being GPLed
is a large part of the reason for Linux's success, rather than being a
coincidence.

(BSD is generally regarded as better stuff than Linux but has no more
than a fifth of Linux's users and developers.  That is why I talk
about GPLed rather than just open-sourced software.)

Since 99% of users and 99% of application development is targeted at
the top 3 or 4 platforms, Linux alone is probably the target of a good
15-20% of all application development effort. 

So, I conclude that a given unit of OS development effort will tend to
yield greater expected number of users and applications developers and
greater expected lifetime if the OS is GPLed than if it is proprietary
--when we restrict ourselves to OSes with educated experienced writers.

This same analysis does not apply to all categories of software because
OSes are subject to unusually fierce network effects.  But programming
languages and their implementations have strong network effects, too,
and there the performance of open-source (non GPL this time) offerings
(measured by number of users times expected longevity) is also
impressive.  eg, Perl, Python, Ruby and Caml users do not lack for
useful libraries and ports to various platforms and need not fear their
language dying out any time soon.  At least the first two languages in
sophisticated markets like Silicon Valley, employers do not fear not
being able to find programmers experienced in the language

I've left many important facts out of my argument, and the argument is
imprecise and uncertain, but sometimes vague is the best you can do.
And it is important: it is kind of sterile to develop something as
labor-intensive as an OS without knowing anything about the economic
forces that determine how popular the thing will become.

Richard