[TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 04:52:52PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > The problem is there was {386,Net,Free,Open,DragonFly}BSD where there
> > should have just been "BSD".  One, not a bunch.
> >
> 
> Except from 1993-1996 there were only two of those BSDs. NetBSD and FreeBSD
> forked in 1993 due to the inability of the patchkit to adequately cover the
> problems
> in 386BSD governance. 

Um, so there were 3: 386, Net and Free.  That's already 2 too many.

> > Where do you think Linux would be if there was {A,B,C,D,E,F,G}Linux?
> > There is one kernel.  One and only one.  With everyone working on that
> > one kernel.
> 
> Except there never really was only one kernel. There have been hundreds
> of forks of the Linux kernel over the years. Most of them have been
> commercial
> of some flavor (Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, MontaVista, WindRiver, Android
> etc)
> had hundreds or thousands of patches on the base Linux kernel for a long
> time
> and trying to move from one to another if you also had patches was a
> nightmare.

So I had a successful commercial product that ran on all of those variants
without issue.  I supported linux on everything from ARM to IBM's z-system
mainframes and all the arches inbetween.  I think I have one #ifdef SPARC
in there because there was a cache flush bug but that was a hardware issue,
not a software issue.

I also supported {Free,Net,Open}BSD and I had way more problems with them
than I did with Linux.

> Kernel.org has kept going, and many of the chanages from these systems were
> lost.
> Some were not as good as what came in upstream, while others were encumbered
> by commercial contracts that made them unappealing to upstream. True, many
> of
> them did wind up in kernel.org, but to say there aren't forks in Linux is
> stretching
> reality a bit...

There is one kernel development stream that matters.  RedHat knows that
if they don't get their stuff into Linus' tree, they have a nightmare
on their hands.  That's why RedHat paid so many of the kernel developers.

Sure, there are forks, but there is one tree that matters, and that is 
Linus' tree.  You can't say that about BSD and that is the problem in
it's entirety.  If I want to change BSD, which one?

> Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to pin which of these
> facts on the ground was the biggest driver for most people...

For me, I gave up when there was no longer one BSD, there was one Linux.

--lm