[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Nevin Liber <nevin@eviloverlord.com>]

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On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 3:24 AM Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz@freaknet.org>
wrote:

> I agree my view is cynical. Maybe that's because I cannot find anything
> romantic or poetic in "financing, regulatory constraints, product
> schedules, commitments, staffing issues, and everything else that isn't
> coding".


Real Artists Ship:  https://folklore.org/Real_Artists_Ship.html

How would you have ever seen Unix had it not been for financing (engineers,
even passionate ones, kind of like to eat and have a roof over their
heads)?  Without regulatory constraints (while not perfect), applying Unix
to anything that is safety critical (lives directly on the line) would be a
disaster.  I can make a similar statement for every single thing in that
list which isn't coding.

There are something like 28 million public repositories on Github.  How
many of them are abandoned (no commitment)?  How many of them are
"beautiful" (for any reasonable definition of "beautiful" you can come up
with)?  Even 1%?  Of those, how many of them have corporate backing (money,
financing, staffing, etc.)?

It's fine to romanticize passion.  But it is also fiction.
-- 
 Nevin ":-)" Liber  <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com>  +1-847-691-1404

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