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

[David Arnold <davida@pobox.com>]

To bring the topic back to some relevance to SIMH: 

Does it _matter_ that we’ve ended up with a handful of Linux variants (RH, Ubuntu, etc, plus Android) and BSD derivatives (macOS, iOS, etc) dominating the Unix world?

If xBSD has some great idea, it’ll get wedged into Linux (one can argue about the elegance of course) and the Apple *OS as soon as it proves beneficial to enough users.  If one out-performs the other, you can bet someone will track it down and fix it. 

Even Windows is adopting Unix/Linux concepts now.

If the kernel.org tree is both the source of many distro variants and the sink for many successful ideas, I can only hope OpenSIMH has similar success. 

Vive la différence!



d

> On 4 Jun 2022, at 11:05, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 06:10:46PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jun 3, 2022, 5:48 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> No. 386BSD died before then.
> 
> Says you.  I was running it in at least 1995.
> 
>>> 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?
>>> 
>> 
>> By your standards, only FreeBSD matters... so that's easy.. but you already
>> said Redhat is all that matters... and that kernel differs somewhat from
>> Linus'. Ditto if you are dealing with Android... it's not just one Linux
>> and never has been.
> 
> So in all of this, the thing that keeps getting missed is Linux won.
> And it didn't win because of the lawsuit, it didn't get crushed by the
> GPL that all the BSD people hate so much, it won on merits.  And it
> won because there was one Linux kernel.  You could, and I have many,
> many times, just clone the latest kernel and compile and install on
> any distribution.  It worked.  The same was never true for all the BSD
> variants.  Tell me about the times you cloned the OpenBSD kernel and
> it worked on FreeBSD.  I'm maybe sure there was maybe one point in time
> where that worked but then for all the other points in time it didn't.
> 
> Like I said, I built and supported a very complex application on all the
> Linux platforms, all architectures, also supported on *BSD, HP-UX, AIX,
> IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, etc, windows{xp,2000,2008,etc}, MacOS.
> The problems I had between the various BSDs were orders of magnitude
> bigger than the problems I had between the various Linux distros we
> supported.
> 
> I will admit that we cloned NetBSD's stdio library because we needed
> to make changes to it (we stacked CRC, XOR, gzip, lz4, etc on it). 
> So we side stepped any stdio issues but for the rest we just made it
> work.  
> 
> So my actual data trumps your opinion on this one.  The BSD splintered 
> enough that they might as well have been IRIX and HP-UX, they weren't
> as crazy as AIX, I think AIX wins crazy, but they were dramatically
> more different, in subtle and annoying ways, than any Linux distro was.
> 
> My whole point is that if BSD had a focus, either a dictator or a 
> steering committee that people like me would have followed, it would
> have won.  It lost.  It sucks that it did, I'm a BSD guy in my core,
> but BSD lost.  And it lost because of a failure in leadership.
> 
> You and the other BSD people don't like that message but it is what it
> is.  BSD lost because Linux had better leadership.