Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

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>
> (Hard to believe that the birthplace of Unix will be forced by management
> to use Windows!)

Research won't be forced to live on it.  However we already are forced to
use it to communicate with those who don't really care what the solution
is, which is most of the company.  Also, if we want to solve peoples'
problems within the company, we have to do it in their context even if
our initial experiments are on Plan 9.  To boldly go, we can use Plan 9.
If we want anyone in our corporate world to follow, we have (or
someone else has) to figure out how to use our solutions in the
other contexts.

For most people, a keyboard and a manual are both fearful things to be
avoided at all cost.  Windows does a pretty good job of making an interface
that can be more or less guessed at by trial pointing and clicking and
lots of prompting.

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From: Brantley Coile <bwc@borf.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:52:50 -0500
Message-ID: <05765b085429865f54c42d315b473a94@borf.com>

	There's also the constant friction caused by not using the solution of the
	day for embedded systems.  It used to be only Vxworks.  Now its slowly opening
	up to Linux because its the flavor of the week at IBM and Lucent looks at
	IBM as the model of a reincarnated big company.  The GPL scares management
	somewhat which acts as a damping force.

A problem with using Linux in embedded systems, and this would be true of any
large source-only system, is that while it give the developers ready made tools,
it also limits their solution to those tools.  I watched one company use Linux
pretty closely and it worked, but the solution is couched very high up.
My first Embedded Unix product was shipped in 1988.  It was based on V7 and
was only 70K or so of kernel and a couple of small programs.  The kernel was
adapted to the applicaion.  Worked really well.  I recently looked into
using Linux for an embedded system, but that didn't work out.  It's not
documented.  I found it frustrating.  Dropped it and went back to my
own small kernels and just wrote more code, which I did faster than
I could figure out how to get Linux to do what I wanted.

Observation: A sufficently large amount of source == no source at all.

(Hard to believe that the birthplace of Unix will be forced by management
to use Windows!)

Brantley