From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2017 20:06:29 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other In-Reply-To: References: <20170221120218.E07BA18C10B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20170221164728.GZ20341@mcvoy.com> <20170222031836.GH9439@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20170222040629.GN9439@mcvoy.com> On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 03:45:54AM +0000, ron minnich wrote: > On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:18 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > > > That was pretty early, Ron. I betcha if you tried it now (or 10 years > > ago) things would be different. > > I think that is true. But from my point of view "linux winning" was not > necessarily "linux was better at the time." I think it was a lot of factors. > > When I got to Los Alamos in 1999, it was still a tossup between the BSDs > and Linux as to "which is better." Nevertheless, for lots of reasons, in > 1998 (the same year I found Linux to be less reliable over time) Los Alamos > had cast its lot with Linux, for all kinds of reasons. I lived through all this and payed close attention to all of the people involved (Theo has/had my Sun 4/470, we argued about VM systems in my flat in SF, Jolitz worked for me, I hung with Chris Demetriou back in the 386BSD days, I was all over that stuff and wanted it to succeed). The open source BSD stuff was a train wreck from the very beginning. Nobody could get along with Jolitz, so NetBSD started, then Theo wanted to be in charge of something so OpenBSD was born. I can't remember how FreeBSD got spun out, but what I do remember is that there were power struggles from day 1. Everyone thought they were better than the other guy, when in fact, what was pretty good was the BSD source base and most of these people, initially, had very little skin in the game in the form of code, they were all leveraging the BSD source base. I actually think Jolitiz had more code in there in the beginning than anyone else. No matter who did what, they couldn't / wouldn't / didn't rally around a single leader and a single project. So it was "divide and fail" where Linux was a big tent, anyone who could write decent code was welcome, but you had to get it past Linus. Which was fine, people figured out he had a clue and put up with the fact that they had to get past his filter (many of us, myself included, valued that filter very, very much). By 1998/1999, all of these BSD struggles for power were blindingly obvious to anyone who was remotely paying attention. I think they were obvious 4-5 years before that. And it wasn't obvious just to people like me, management types track this stuff far more than most people believe. They have to back the right horse or it costs them. Linux was simply a safer bet. The community was larger and growing very fast. I was program committee chair at Linux Expo in 1999 (sort of their Usenix at the time). It was way more fun than Usenix. I think a lot of the "better" stuff came from the fact that Linux got networking long after BSD had pretty sweet networking. The BSD guys still think their networking is better than Linux (pro tip, it is not, go read networking research papers, they all use Linux as the platform and it's not because there is so much to fix, it's because Linux networking is better). BSD hasn't been better than Linux in any way that I know of for about 15 years. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm