[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 10:21 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
>> it before it had networking.
>>
>> Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
>> with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
>> that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
>> and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.
>
> By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that could work on the kernel at a high level of skill.

There were also a lot of gatekeepers. Perhaps not so much in CSRG, but
certainly in the next tier out: if you weren't part of the in-crowd at
USENIX and on USENET, it was hard to contribute. Ted has referred to
this as kowtowing to the "Gods of BSD." He wasn't wrong, though I
think the dynamic has changed substantially in recent years.

> There was no one person who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge because he wrote the whole thing...  BSD was a victim of it's own success in the 80s and 90s in a way...

I'm struck by the thing Ken said in the video that was linked earlier,
so much of "success" has to do with luck. Unix was in the right place
at the right time, spread through universities, and escaped into
industry. It's one of the relatively few research projects that was
truly successful in that sense. But consider that it also had
something like five years to incubate in a lab before that happened,
and the members of that lab had a vested interest in making it useful
(after all, they were using it for their own consumption!). By the
time BSD came along, Unix already had a well-defined "shape" and a
certain degree of polish; contributing meant there was a bar you had
to hurdle.

On the other hand, Torvalds published Linux when it was still a toy,
but critically, at a point where the industry was at a real inflection
point, due to external factors. More capable research systems had been
out there before, and open source BSDs were right around the corner,
but they didn't win. I think this was mostly luck and timing. He also
pretty much took from everybody, which made it much more of a "big
tent" sort of thing as opposed to the faculty lunchroom vibe prevalent
in the Unix world (what I've previously described as, "the old-school
Unix mentality"). Periodically we see how this still rankles some,
even on this mailing list.

But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance"
thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these
days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing
a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if
you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest
a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming
process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that
effort. And there's definitely an in-group. Meanwhile, the BSDs seem a
lot more accepting; maybe that's just me. At least FreeBSD and
DragonFly appear that way. Anyway, it seems fair to say that Linux
seems mostly beholden to the interests of big companies these days.

Linus is personally responsible for much of Linux's success, but I
think he will also be the thing that causes Linux's demise, though
indirectly. He's as much of a cult of personality as he is a technical
leader; when he's gone (and in the limit we're all mortal) who will
step into his shoes? Then again, maybe I'm wrong: I thought this would
happen when Jobs died, but Cook seems to have stepped into the role
nicely and Apple's doing just fine. Steve Jobs chose wisely; perhaps
Linus will as well.

        - Dan C.

>> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 01:02:20AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
>> > five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.
>> >
>> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
>> > > to free.
>> > >
>> > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
>> > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
>> > > > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
>> > > > was crazy, but he was right.
>> > > >
>> > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > > >
>> > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>> > > > >
>> > > > > FYI.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Arnold
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > ---
>> > > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>>
>> --
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat