🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <STEINARB.91Nov11221334@fenris.idt.unit.no> steinarb@idt.unit.no (Steinar Bang) writes:
>>>>>> On 8 Nov 91 12:13:25 GMT, amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) said:
>
>> [...]
>> Even diehard UNIX shops like AT&T USL seems to be starting to acquire
>> the attitude that UNIX will lose the desktop and the display, and end
>> up being relegated to server machines.
>
>Nah! This depends on the market. Might be that UNIX'll never take over
>the mass market, but it will *certainly* keep its position in the
>technical/scientific market. I don't think the people at my previous

If that's the case there are an awful lot of computer companies that
are going to go under.  The business market is the fastest growing
segment of the Unix market.  The current set of companies out there
can not survive on teh tech/sci markets growth rate.

>place of employment would be willing to trade their DecStations and
>Sparcs for 486 PC's

How about Windows/NT on a MIPS R4000?

>> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
>
>>> We're trying to make applications on Unix friendly enough and
>>> consistant enough that Unix doesn't lose the commercial market.
>>> Sometimes I'm not even sure it's worth the effort.
>>> Some (many?) of you may not give a damn.  There certainly doesn't seem to
>>> be much effort in this direction in GNU software.
>
>This has a bit to do with priorities. The main priority of the GNU

Of course.  So?

>The GNU OS will be a system made *by* programmers, *for* programmers
>(and thus follows the priorities of programmers).

Quite true.  So was Unix, and all the statements I've made above
still stand.  None of this is relevant to the future of Unix.  If
Unix fails in the business/mass market then indeed GNU may be one of
the few viable Unix options around.  And people who have time to
hack on it can use it, and people who have to make a living will
use something else.  Clearly you fit in the "not give a damn"
category, so it's not much use my arguing that this is all a waste
of time.

>My (unaffilated) guess is: If someone wishes to implement a system
>that is friendly to the end-user, on top of the GNU OS, they will be
>welcome to do so. However, it will be a looooong time before this is a
>priority of the FSF

Precisely.  But is that good?

>>> You don't win this game by being right, or being fast, or being
>>> technologically advanced (that should all be pretty clear already -
>>> we are talking Unix after all), you win *this* game by being cheap
>>> and easy.  And Unix isn't either.
>
>> Bingo.
>
>Well, hey! The FSF isn't in business "to win the game",... they have
>their own priorities.

Fine.  I have a different set of priorities.  I either want to
work on something that breaks new ground, or something that makes
computers more accessible to real people.  Ideally I'd like to do
both.  I've worked on a dead-end operating system before, it
at least had the quality of being state-of-the-art, which is, as
far as I know, not going to be a quality of GNU.  (Typed file
system?  Transparent networking?  Object-oriented file/streams
management?  Demand paging from the file system? (Actually even 
those are at least 10 year old technology.))  GNU software is
good, but very little of it is new.  Most of it is simply old stuff
done faster with more features.  To the end-user it's still just Unix.
If your idea of the future of Unix is that it be relegated to a small
corner of the universe where it gets used by an obscure set of hackers
then keep at it; you're right on target.
-- 
Alfalfa Software, Inc.          |       Poste:  The EMail for Unix
nazgul@alfalfa.com              |       Send Anything... Anywhere
617/497-2922                    |       info@alfalfa.com

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.