🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <402eq0$7im@sundog.tiac.net>, Jim Williams <williams@tiac.net> wrote:

> There aren't any, but if you want to hunt about you can find out what 
> people are working on.

In other words, there is no unified architecture.  Then again, if you
aren't going to try and innovate (more on this later), I guess you don't
need one.

> You obviously don't understand what Linux is.  First of all, technically 
> Linux is a kernel and most of the utilities used with it are actually GNU 
> software.  The Linux kernel was largely written by Linus Torvald in 
> consultation with numberous people around the world -- using Internet as 
> the medium of communication.  Linus still coordinates the kernel changes, 
> but a large percentage of the code is written by other people -- again, 
> throughout the world.

Re-implementing a two decade old operating system that other people have
been reimplementing over and over and over really doesn't impress me. 
Copying something that you have a 20 years worth of models to look at is
far, far easier than trying to implement something new and unproven.

> Other parts of what is commonly called Linux are being written by whoever 
> wants to do it (whereever they happen to be).  Much of this code is not 
> really Linux specific, and can be used on other Free Unix systems.  (Not 
> all of this software is transparently portable to other kernels.)

And there is lots of freeware and shareware for every major computing
platform out there.  Again, not all that impressive.  Plus, for both Macs
and PCs, there is a whole bunch more software to choose from (the
commercial sector).

> The point here is that all you have to do if you want to know what's 
> happening with Linux is become part of the community.  Linux is not a 
> commercial product, and there is no reason to expect the Linux community 
> to play by commercial rules.  Linux is an Extremely Open System, written 
> by people who care about what a system should be.

First off, Linux is written by people who care about what a *Unix* system
should be.  You can do far, far better from an operating system point of
view if you don't constrain yourself to staying compatible with Unix.

Secondly, I've heard the same spiel from the FSF advocates for at least
the last decade.  Looking back, what have they produced?

On the plus side:  the quality of their tools is better than what ships
standard on most Unix systems.  They also tend to have more features.

On the minus side:  their tools tend to be slower than most (eg: gcc is
one of the slowest compilers I've ever used).  Also, the tools don't give
me a particularly better environment than I can get with an off the shelf
Unix box.  Although they've done a great job refining the toolset, there
isn't much new stuff in the toolbox.

Companies like Apple, on the other hand, work hard on providing new
technologies.  Things like QuickTime, PlainTalk, etc.  I've never seen
this kind of stuff come out of the GNU community.  I'd be far more
impressed and far more embracing if I saw them pushing the envelope
instead of small refinements; innovating instead of just evolving.

Why do you think Stallman hates patents?  If you don't do any innovation
yourself, they tend to work against you.  Ironically, MIT makes a fair bit
of change off of their patents, but I never did hear Stallman or any of
the other FSF people refuse to use MIT's facilities because of it.  I
guess it's *bad* when Apple has them, but *good* when MIT has them.

My Unix environment hasn't fundamentally improved (or heck, even changed
in terms of user experience) in the last 5 years.  My Mac environment has,
in both terms of user experience and development tools.  You might not
like the underlying OS; then again, except for developers, most people
don't see it.

Even the latest Unix claim to fame, the World Wide Web, isn't very
impressive from a technical standpoint.  It could have been written years
ago.  The cool thing about it is the infrastructure of sites out there,
not the technology.

You guys complain that cooperative multitasking is *bad*, yet cooperative
networking like TCP (eg: congestion control on the client side) is *good*?

> A bit of a warning though, you can't really find out what the future 
> direction of Linux is going to be without having an effect on the future 
> direction of Linux.  It's a bit like quantum mechanics that way.  :)

Or, more likely, wait for companies like Apple to try something new out,
and if people like it, then maybe someone will port it over to Linux.

The other thing is, applications are important.  The Linux community wants
people to jump on their bandwagon, yet when someone asks them if it will
run the latest and greatest word processor or spreadsheet, the answer is
no.  The vast majority of people who buy computers don't buy them to run
the latest and greatest operating system; they buy them to get useful work
done.  Maybe you get a high out of tweaking makefiles and writing cool
scripts to do stuff that should have been designed in in the first place
(eg: for how many years was putting the current working directory in the
prompt of a shell a really clever, slick hack instead of a supported
feature?), but I would rather concentrate on the task at hand.  And so
would most people.
-- 
        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799
                                                office: (520) 621-1815