From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 13593 invoked from network); 6 Jun 2022 01:15:24 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (2600:3c01:e000:146::1) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 6 Jun 2022 01:15:24 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DE01E42214; Mon, 6 Jun 2022 11:15:20 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 2E4BF42212 for ; Mon, 6 Jun 2022 11:15:12 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 88A7435E921; Sun, 5 Jun 2022 18:15:11 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2022 18:15:11 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: Theodore Ts'o Message-ID: <20220606011511.GG10240@mcvoy.com> References: <20220603213215.GO10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603214032.GQ10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603223014.GS10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603234822.GV10240@mcvoy.com> <20220604010543.GZ10240@mcvoy.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Message-ID-Hash: 6QOH55KY6JEWLWPFDRTLZLITGKU6MKNA X-Message-ID-Hash: 6QOH55KY6JEWLWPFDRTLZLITGKU6MKNA X-MailFrom: lm@mcvoy.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Sun, Jun 05, 2022 at 08:32:47PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > An interesting question is if CSRG had been actively pushing the state > of the art foreward, would that have provided sufficient centripetal > force to keep the HP/UX, SunOS, DG/UX, etc., from spintering? After > all, it's natural to want to get a competitive advantage over your > competition by adding new features --- this is what I call the "Legacy > Unix value-add disease". But if you can't keep up with the upstream > developments, that provides a strong disincentive from making > permanent forks. For that matter, why was it that successive new > releases of AT&T System V wasn't able to play a similar role? Was it > because the rate of change was too slow? Was it because applications > weren't compatible anyway due to ISA differences? I don't know.... I think I know but my opinion is very Sun centric. Sun was the innovator of the the time. NFS, RPC, VM system that replaced the buffer cache so everything was just pages, read/write/map, all the same pages. Sun had critical mass in talent and they innovated. Everyone else followed Sun (and hated them for it). AT&T, other than the original group that did Unix, didn't innovate much in the Unix domain. SysV was sort of meh compared to SunOS. When Unix was sort of a skunk works, tons of good stuff happened. When corporate took it over, it became less interesting. There was some good stuff, I liked the document work bench stuff, I liked learn(1), it wasn't all bad. But it wasn't even close to the same pace of innovation that Sun had, I'm super grateful to have been at Sun while that was happening, that's a once in a lifetime experience. AT&T did fund Plan 9, if I remember history correctly, so that was a step back towards the original Unix innovation team. I really wanted plan 9 to take over but AT&T kept it away from open source too long and Linux was too entrenched. Classic Betamax vs VHS, the less good answer won. Sigh. > So from a computer science point of view, one could argue that NetBSD > was "better", and that Linux had a whole bunch of hacks, and some > might even argue was written by a bunch of hacks. :-) However, from > the user's perspective, who Just Wanted Their Laptop To Work, the fact > that Linux had some kind of rough PCMCIA support first mattered a lot > more than a "we will ship no code before its time" attitude. And > some of those users would become developers, which would cause a > positive feedback loop. I think "it just works" is key. Linux was really competing with Windows and Linus knew that. He could have cared less about *BSD, they just weren't on his radar screen. But Windows was. Very early versions of RedHat were good enough on the install that you could just tab your way through it. I remember being impressed because I was installing a machine that didn't have a mouse (yet) and I just tabbed my way through it and it was fine. Today's FreeBSD install process is like a trip back to 1980. It is not pleasant. The Linux install process 15 years ago was a better experience than Windows install process (if you've done the windows install then get some ethernet dongle that windows recognizes so you can connect to the internet, then do the driver search and install, install, install all the drivers - contrast that with Linux where it just has 99% of the drivers in the kernel). "It just works" for the win.