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Linux and the Unix Philosophy
The good stuff... I enjoyed Mike Gancarz' first book The Unix Philosophy greatly when I was first getting into the Unix world, and was hoping for an updated version. The thing that makes this book stand out in the shelves full of How-To, Dummy, and Administrator guides is the fact that it covers the What and Why of Unix/Linux rather than the How's. I am constantly amazed at Unix books that are mostly printed man files, and things that can easily be googled. This book explains with great precision why Unix is the way it is, and what separates it from other OS paradigms.
I realized the importance of this book after reading it, and being forced to do interviews for a Unix Engineer at my office. Of the 7 candidates, 6 of them seemed to know the textbook stuff. They knew the commands, they knew vi and a handful of scripting languages to a degree of proficiency. Alas, this is what it takes to become a Unix Administrator, not an Engineer that needs to see the whole picture. In this world of "puppy mill" Unix admins who have certifications and know one or two flavors of Unix/Linux, this book really teaches people the core of why Unix/Linux is the way it is, and why it is so attractive to those who really care about which OS to use.
The last chapter -- "Brave New (Unix) World)" -- is the real kicker. Gancarz really drives it home, and shows how the Unix/Linux philosophy has made it into other aspects of technology, and in the world we live in.
The not-so-good stuff ... With every good book, there must be some bad, although this one's errors are quite forgivable. Although I appreciate any book that loosens the RFC style nature of so many technical books, sometimes it can go a little too far. This, however, is for each reader to judge. Some of the puns made me squirm, but for the most part they added a nice touch of levity to the book. So, depending on your threshold for python-esque puns or corny Elvis jokes, the book may not be for you, but knowing the /. Crowd, I don't think it will cause anything more than some groans and giggles. All in All... This is a quality book. It is one that should be re-read every now and then to make sure you do not stray from the Tenets that Gancarz drives home throughout the book via anecdotal evidence.This book can and should be read by anyone from a newbie hacker to a Corporate CEO. It is just technical enough not to make one feel patronized, and eases you into it with general concepts just enough to make it not feel like reading IETF standards. Here are the chapters, which give a good overview of what each is about:
- Table of Contents
- The Unix Philosophy: A Cast of Thousand
- One Small Step for Humankind
- Rapid Prototyping for Fun and Profit
- The Portability Priority
- Now THAT'S Leverage!
- The Perils of Interactive Programs
- More Unix Philosophy: Ten Lesser Tenets
- Making Unix Do One Thing Well
- Unix and Other Operating System Philosophies
- Through the Glass Darkly: Linux vs. Windows
- A Cathedral? How Bizarre!
- Brave New (Unix) World
Although this is not the cheapest book in the rack, it packs more of a punch than half of the books on my shelf, so I think it is worth it. I found it a great read on the metro on the way to work in the morning, and found myself finishing it well within a week. With 200 pages, and by making it fun to read, Linux and the Unix Philosophy breezes by and makes for a great read.
You can purchase Linux and the Unix Philosophy from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This virus today is so nasty it's knocked /. over to the side! Or did somebody just forget to close that italics tag...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
SCO has determined that this book has violated it intellectual property. While you can buy the book, you require an additional SCO license to read the book. That'll be $699.
It's the Jungian thing. The duality of the href and the closing tag.
Linux can't afford braces because it's free!
1. Though shalt end your italic tags.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I'm an "editor" for a popular blog, but I don't know how to close an <I> tag. plzhlpkthx.
The book is not about business philosophy, it is about the OS itself: the paradigm that Unix/Linux was designed around.
I still fail to understand how Unix and Philosophy relate at all?
To a lesser degree I can understand why you might relate Linux and Philosophy together... even then I think you would be making a mistake. Now, open source... to a certain degree there is a philosophy aspect there, and even still I think its a bit of a stretch.
Design principles... sure... Philosophy... um... no.
Then again, a few years back... it was the Zen of Whatever... maybe Zen was used up, and the publishing world needs a new catch phrase.
Why not just wait for this to come out?
The Art of Unix Programming
Now that I think of it, the two things Berkley is famous for is UNIX and LSD, and I dont' think it's a coincidence.
Some of the major tenets of the original UNIX philosophy were:
- Small is beautiful.
- Make each program do one thing well.
Why is it then that there are people out there who spend their entire lives with UNIX/Linux, and who ignore this?
Some of the best examples are sendmail and emacs. And no, this isn't a troll. But I just don't understand why such people just don't get it. Clearly it isn't a lack of intelligence.
But this paradox is something which I've never been able to figure out.
This sounds like an awesome read, especially should be considered by the "geeks-in-training". Someone who has friends into *nix, hears them raving about it, but doesn't completely understand why. I've been involved with the computing community for a long time, and even consider myself a geek, but when it comes right down to the real nitty-gritty of why Linux is A Good Thing(tm), I don't know that much (other than a cute mascot).
+5, Female
Unix started as a way to run a non-vender-supported OS on cheap PDP-11s. Unix eventually became highly commercialized and proprietized, but it started life as a hobbyist project (of sorts).
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The UNIX philisophy part is mostly technical
while the Linux part is mostly non techical
with emphasis on GNU, Free Software and
Open Source.
A detailed technical differences list
alongwith a idealogical difference (eg
*BSD vs Linux) list would have been useful.
Some of the puns made me squirm, but for the most part they added a nice touch of levity to the book. So, depending on your threshold for python-esque puns or corny Elvis jokes, the book may not be for you, but knowing the /. Crowd, I don't think it will cause anything more than some groans and giggles.
:)
This is a quality book. It is one that should be re-read every now and then to make sure you do not stray from the Tenets that Gancarz drives home throughout the book via anecdotal evidence.
Are these two items REQUIRED for book reviews on Slashdot? The word "andecdotal" and "puns"?
Doesn't seem like it.
This review basically consisted of one paragraph describing the book and a table of contents. I didn't get a real good feel of what to expect from the book. Why is it like In The Beginning?
I guess I was hoping for a little more detail about why this book is good other than "it's not man pages or RFCs."
Mike Gancarz's book The UNIX Philosophy (Digital Press, 1995) describes many of the ideas and conventions that have made unix a great sytem. It starts with a short run down of the history, quickly getting to the meat of things, discussion of the major ideas of Unixdom and illustrations of why they are such good ideas. While many of the ideas may seem relatively obvious to anyone who's worked with the system before, it makes an excellent introduction to the traditions of the Unix world, as well as an excelent bit of advocacy for why the Unix way is the Right Way.
...and the ten lesser points:
Listed in the first chapter, the following nine points are the key tenets:
Small is beautiful
Make each program do one thing
Build a prototype as soon as possible
Choose portability over efficiency
Store numerical data in flat ASCII files
Use software leverage to your advantage
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability
Avoid captive user interfaces
Make every program a filter
Allow the user to tailor the environment:
Make operating system kernels small and lightweight:
Use lower case and keep it short
Save trees
Silence is golden
Think parallel
The sum of the parts is greater than the whole
Look for the 90 percent solution
Worse is better
Think hierarchiacally
If you need braces, I can take care of the operation cheap. I even use Linux so I can keep the costs low for you, the consumer.
And as an added benifit you don't have to worry about a blue screen during the middle of an operation. Or even worse, a RPC exploit which leads to a paddling in Soviet Russia.
Don't you see what happens? Either the Slashbot apologists or the editors themselves slap you around, picking "Offtopic" and smashing that Moderate button with fury. That'll learn ya!
Your post was a funny way of pointing out a goof, but these days, the only posts deemed funny have SCO or M$ in them...
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
What about this book:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxkernel2/
It has linux kernel 2.4 snippets?
That's DEFINATELY violating SCO's (fake) IP.
ChiefArcher
All of us old-timer Unix folks love to fuss over the worst trangession of a commercial Unix or Linux distro or project makes when it comes to Unix philosophy.
/opt that should be in /usr or the other way around or maybe its a linux distro dumping everything in /usr or a project creating these huge programs that should be split into smaller utilities maybe with a unifying gui.
Whether it is Sun throwing things in
We all have our complaints.
What are yours?
ACK
The Unix Philosophy can be stated in several ways:
"Small interconnecting components"
"Never use one program where you could use several"
"Plumbing is good"
If is a continual source of amazement to me that GNU tools (eg, tar -AcdrtuxbBCfFGhijykKlLmMnNoOpPRsSTIUvVwWXZz7) are widely used despite this.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...there was an author named Neal Stephenson who also wrote a book called "In the Beginning Was The Command Line"
Neil should have had his editor check up on that.
Sure, we've all writing massively pipeline shell one-liners to do day-to-day tasks, but these are just one-time, throw-away code. All of my real Unix apps that I use every day are huge monolithic applications, not a composition of many tiny apps connected by pipes. My web browser is a monolithic app, not connected by pipes. GCC is a couple of monolithic applications, optionally connected by pipes, but never reconnected in any useful way (cpp notwithstanding). My newsreader and mailreader again, monolithic applications. My MTA, again, a monolithic application. Not one large program I use is a shell script, or collection of small, interchangeable programs.
So, is this Unix tool philosophy useful for real applications, or just for little shell scripts?
Unix started as a way to run a non-vender-supported OS on cheap PDP-11s.
Also its creators did a lot to encourage independent porting on VAXen and other 70's machines.
Unix eventually became highly commercialized and proprietized, but it started life as a hobbyist project (of sorts).
I'd rather not use the term "hobbyist". AT&T was bound by anti-trust regulations to supply their inventions to universities. Scientists took it the way they like the best - with emphasis on peer review and free circulation of information (free as in beer and as in speech). I think that "scientific" or "academic" is a better description. After all, they weren't amateurs.
Avoiding Stallman's pun, what exactly is UNIX? Does Linux qualify? Apple OS X+? Exotic OS's like Mach?
In the mid-1980s an industrial/governemnt consortium tried to defined an unified UNIX API, called Posix. Then it would be straight forward to implement the UNIX utilities, command user interfaces, and apps on top this. I recall some companies layering Posix on top of VMS, MVS, and other non-UNIX kernals. Are these UNIX?
Another approach was extending the UNIX philosophy of a simple machine image to more modern computers than those in the early 1970s. Mach assumed a computer model with multiple CPUs and memory subsystems. BeOS assumed a computer model where multimedia was the norm. So are these OS's "more UNIX-like than UNIX" then?
Why? So the writer and publisher can make money!
Amazing magic tricks
I found this review to be lacking in content. It doesn't discuss the content of the book to any extent; instead it talks about how it got him a job promotion to UNIX Engineer. How did it do this? What did you learn from the book that gave you such an additional skillset to be promoted to UNIX Engineer? What are the differences between the UNIX Administrator and the UNIX Engineer you are referring to?
I am constantly amazed at Unix books that are mostly printed man files, and things that can easily be googled. This book explains with great precision why Unix is the way it is, and what separates it from other OS paradigms.
I've not found any books that are mostly printed man pages. Nor have I found any circumstances where the man pages don't cover things I need to know. In any case, what parts of UNIX does it explain? Is it explaining Linux or UNIX? What OS "paradigms" are you referring to? You are going by this definition aren't you?
I realized the importance of this book after reading it, and being forced to do interviews for a Unix Engineer at my office.
What importance did you realize this book serving after you had read it? Are you sure this gave you applicable knowledge to separate "UNIX Administrators" from "UNIX Engineers"? What is the difference here?
Although I appreciate any book that loosens the RFC style nature of so many technical books, sometimes it can go a little too far.
Why? If it's discussing that you need to know an RFC to understand why something works the way it does (you've stated that this book talks more about the why than how), how does it make it "not-so-good"?
So, depending on your threshold for python-esque puns or corny Elvis jokes, the book may not be for you...
Do the few puns in the book really take that much of the quality away?
I don't think that this book should be re-read from time to time. I think new editions should be published as UNIX and Linux continue to evolve in their own separate directions (yes, they're going in somewhat separate directions).
Your listing of the TOC didn't give me any idea about what was covered? WTF is "Now THAT'S Leverage" about? What "Lesser Tenants" are being referred to? What "One Thing" does UNIX do well?
You've left me with more questions about this book than I would have had otherwise. Please try to do a more thorough review next time.
And, to get on a technicality that will probably cost me this comment as a Troll, Linux IS NOT THE NEW FACE OF UNIX. Most distributions also don't even come close to being something that would compare to a UNIX certified system.
Finally, please excuse my harshness. I just feel you could have done a better, much more descriptive job. Don't take it personally.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
However, in creating 'just a fucking operating system' you do need to have some guiding principles, which become a philosophy. Nothing to do with wanky paragraphs of a few words which cost millions to 'brainstorm'.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Perhaps you have heard of BSD Unix...?
Does Gancarz think the advent of linux and large open source projects provides anything for the UNIX philosophers to learn from, or is his book meant to be old wisdom for the new kids? It's hard to tell from the review.
Thought i'd let you know ...
B0mbtruck, one base at a time
The people involved certainly weren't amateurs, but the project itself started as an attempt to get the "Space Travel" game working on a PDP-7 and eventually crept into use through the "back door" of the company as Unix become more and more feature-rich. It took over minicomputer land, eventually, but started out as a small OS with small goals but with lots of portability behind it - quite similar to Linux. AT&T eventually supplied Unix to scientists (thanks to anti-trust requirements) and universities, but only after its worth had been established.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Amazon has it $5 cheaper and with FREE shipping!
One of the core tenets of UNIX was that you have small, simple tools and you glue them together. But now the popular programming languages under Linux are C++, Python, and Perl, none of which follow this philosophy. And to get to the point where Linux is a true alternative to Windows on the desktop, you have to put a massive X server on top of the kernel, and put a massive window manager and desktop environment on top of that. In the end, "Linux" is not a simple thing (and arguably even the kernel is not simple, but the API is), because you are looking at the combination of X+Qt+KDE, and that pretty much throws all philosophy out the Window. (Yes, I know you can use Blackbox or something else instead, but then don't go arguing that it's a suitable replacement for Windows.)
Have you ever read code from some of the original UNIX team, such as Kernhigan's Software Tools? Wow, can that man write clean and clear code. The original C compiler is similarly concise. But then look at the sources to just about any Open Source project and see that (1) there's a massive amount of code, and (2) it's mostly very ugly. Unfortunately, even though it's illogical, "open source" and "simplicity" aren't as intimately tied together as one would expect.
I don't feel that Unix will ever "die" as you state, despite all the Oracle propaganda Linux is the still the new kid on the block in the *nix sector and has a long way to go in terms of enterprise features which commercial UNIX variants have. Not to mention, some business managers only feel safe with a product if they've paid good money for it (the whole you get what you pay for philosophy and having a vendor to point the finger at) I know that sounds odd but its often true as I've worked for a few very large companies that refuse to adopt UNIX because it's free.
There's nothing wrong with using commercial closed business model's, it all depends on your particular situation, you need to use whichever philosophy and technology is best in your situation. Sometimes having something that is open to the world can be a bad thing.
I've worked for a few very large companies that refuse to adopt UNIX because it's free. ;P
Substitute UNIX = Linux my mind must be failing in my old age.
Because the old UNIX philosophy is NO LONGER APPLICABLE to a huge new range of computing tasks that we put our machines through today.
:)
We need a lot MORE from our machines now in almost infinately more complex ways than they were put through when the "UNIX philosophy" was born.
Times change and "UNIX" had better change with it or it truly will be a dead OS, or at least relegated to niche/embedded single purpose markets. Actually sounds like the UNIX philosophy applied to the USE of the OS itself! Small, single purpose devices
I already know this. That is what my joke was making reference to. I will spell it out for you: oh - bee - vee - eye - oh - you - es.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
linux is linux
unix is unix
Linux is a unix like operating system, but it is not based on either BSD or System V, thus it is most certainly not 'unix'
If text manipulation and piping didn't work well in UNIX, you'd know about it -- all those tasks would be a real thorn in your side. As it is, you have the right tools, so they're no big deal.
Everything that is designed has a philosophy. For example, imaging a bunch of guys standing around trying to design a four-wheeled vehicle. Here are examples of different philosophies:
1) The car should become a part of the driver. Getting into the car should feel like putting on a running shoe.
2) The car should be functional, yet inexpensive.
3) The car should haul lots of stuff.
4) The car should haul.
Each "philosophy" will produce a very different result. *NIX DOES have a very different feel from Windows.
In Windows, everything is centralized. This is why there is a registry -- one place to keep all data. The web browser is also tightly integrated into the core OS.
In Linux, everything is a little piece. If you want to build your own system, you can pick and choose which packages to install. No GUI, no problem. Every program sticks its configuration into separate little text files.
Which is better is a matter of opinion, and both have their strengths and weaknesses. Both Linux and Microsoft have managed to make some rather good operating systems. In fact, I kind of like Windows (at times). All you have to do is get rid of all Microsoft management and lawyers, and you could have a pretty good company. Then, hire some programmers who know something about security, and you could have the perfect desktop OS. Install a *NIX kernel, and you would have something perfect for the server market
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Don't perpetuate the myth that LSD burns out your brian.
Tryptamines are good for you.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Intended for people with computer experience who are new to Unix (no "For Dummies" nonsense). I found it illuminating when I first started using Linux: Think Unix, by Jon Lasser.
JP
Wenn Nordlichter heulen am Himmel
ist Haut gegen Haut schon Bedeutung
an sich, unter der Decke,
das Fenster zolldick beschlagen mit Eis,
wir warmen einander unterm Magnetsturm
Geknister am Himmel
Vor diesem Aufenthalt hier
glaubte ich noch an tintenfleckige Lehren:
daB Todesverachtung
Liebe zum Leben ist,
und andres und unter andrem,
eine klamme Hand schreibt sowas nicht,
20C signiert das Fenster
Wir brauchen nicht Lehren
nur Schneeschuhe, gegen Morgen seh ich
den Himmel anders, hore mich um:
der ambulante Laden kommt einmal die Woche
falls er sich uberhaupt zu fahren bequemt
Look Pa, come quick! You won't beleive this!
We finally found some fool that actually fell for that SCO nonsense!
Huh?
Well, most people who create something usually think what is their goal, their guiding idea; they need to think what the hell they're trying to accomplish by creating the thing.
So operating systems, like everything else, have been built based on the design principles. A philosophy, if you will.
Most people do not realize the simple truth that things you do are often easier to do if you know what you're supposed to be doing. Profound thought, eh?
That's NOT what he's talking about.
The "Unix Philosophy" is the philosophy behind Unix-like O/S'es LIKE LINUX. It's a design philosophy, NOT a marketing one, or even an economic one. Vastly oversimplifying,
1. Don't create huge monolithic programs if you can help it. Create small, elegant programs that each do one specific thing well. Use a scripting language to pipe them together, amplifying their usefulness.
2. Because you want to be able to pipe small programs together to aggregate their usefulness, avoid "captive user interfaces", i.e. interactivity. Lean towards writing software that is comfortable running in batch, on a pipe, in a script. Use command line arguments.
3. Don't reinvent the wheel. If there's already a tool that does what you want to do, use it. If you need to extend its functionality, script it with another tool or tools.
4. Lean towards command line programming, because then everything you've got can be scripted, run in crontab, run in batch, etc. The command line is your friend.
5. Everything is a file. This lets you interact with hardware directly, in your software.
6. Store data as flat text whenever possible, so that down the road, if you want to use it with another program, you'll be able to. This also lets you sift through your data using grep and awk.
7. Use text streams whenever you can, for similar reasons to #6. Got a socket? Pass flat text, not binary. Unless you really MUST pass binary.
I've probably left a whole lot out, but this is the basic gist of it. It's why Linux, Unix, and the *BSDs are so much more useful than Windows.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Plus, I like the built-in multilayer pun:
Whereas Multics (which wouldn't run on their PDP) was multiplexed, Unix (which would) was not -- and you've got that whole "Eunuchs/Unix" joke, where the boss says, "I need more Unix programmers, the company nurse will be by later..."
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
UNIX = Commercial way of thinking
The UNIX philosophy has nothing to do with commercial vs Free, or closed vs open and has everything to do with design and problem solving. The comercial aspects of UNIX culture were imposed upon UNIX by shareholders and corporations with little or no regard for who had designed the product, whether they had been compensated, or how future maintainance and development would be accomplished. The development of the EMACS editor, the GNU project, and the GPL license were a reaction to these changes in UNIX development. The GPL was not created as an economic "weapon", nor was it created with money in mind at all. It was motivated by a desire to have the source code available to anybody with an idea and the know-how to implement it.
Many posters here seem to be obsessed with money, and it can't be good for thier thinking. Whether they are dogmatic about giving away for free or about charging for every last thought, it betrays an unwillingness to view subjects and viewpoints as other than economically based. I admit that the economics of software development need be considered in any project, but my opinion is that making design decisions based on monetary arguments is putting the cart before the horse and will often result in poorly designed and inferior software.
The UNIX philosophy is not incompatible with the GPL, nor is it incompatible with comercial licensing In fact, the GPL has very little to do wih money in any way whatsoever. In other words, read the book, come back and discuss philosophy when you're prepared.
Read, L
1) Give the slashbots a bunch of pablum that they want to hear, for karma whoring goodness.
2) Wrap the whole thing with a "misunderstanding" of what the author was trying to say, for a good reply count.
3) Getting first post.
Keep up the good work! I salute you, sir.
Qmail is a great example of the Unix philosophy. It is a large, powerful system built with many smaller programs which do one thing well, and communicate via pipes (or the filesystem). I'm not familiar with cbb. But Qmail is almost the exception that proves the rule -- I can't think of any other large application that is built with this Unix philosophy, almost every other is one big program with IPC done via function calls.
please see http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html Xah Lee
But I find that sendmail is easy to confiure, it has a very small (1-2) page m4 configuration file (sendmail.mc), and its incredibly powerful. Most people just don't understand that they will in all likelyhood never have to edit the sendmail.cf file. Its only there to support exotic configurations. Buy the bat book and read a couple chapters. After that, you can sell the book, because you will know enough to set up 99.99% of all mail servers.
As for security issues, it seems to have fewer cert's than the Linux kernel, so patch quickly and you should be ok.
And as for Gnome and KDE, well.... Yeah. But then most of the machines I manage don't even have X installed. What irritates me is that most of the common distro's (I use RedHat) are moving to brain dead desktops that are about as configurable as a Microsoft EULA. I don't mind them "unifying" the desktops but the glaring lack of choice and then the removal of the configuration tools means that I have to do a lot of post install, install so that I can fix things. Hell, you can't even set the background color without running Nautilus.
There were two main branches of UNIX. The first was the commercialized AT&T/USL UNIX, which SCO know apparently owns. The other branch of BSD UNIX. From day one this was noncommercial. It was BSD UNIX that made UNIX a success. Without BSD, UNIX would be down and out in the gutter sharing a bottle of Ripple with Multics and cursing its fortunes.
BSD might not be allowed to call itself a "UNIX" today, but the fact remains that it is still UNIX and it is Free Software.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
nt
The text for Neal Stephenson's book "In the Beginning..." can be downloaded here. Haven't read it yet, but when did that stop anyone here :-)
1. Don't create huge monolithic programs if you can help it. Create small, elegant programs that each do one specific thing well. Use a scripting language to pipe them together, amplifying their usefulness.
:-)
Absolutely. Of course the corrolary of 1-4 above is that if you need interactivity, write a script to do this for you
6. Store data as flat text whenever possible, so that down the road, if you want to use it with another program, you'll be able to. This also lets you sift through your data using grep and awk.
This is connected with the idea of text as a universal data format. This is true to a large extent and is something I use when it is the best solution, but let me offer a different aspect here:
This point seems to exist because the text-processing tools (sed, awk, grep, even Perl) are extremely powerful and well developed so that writing the data to a text file genreally provides a great deal of flexibility. But what if your data is more complex? Shouldn't you store it in an RDBMS instead?
In fact, by storing the data in an RDBMS aren't you accomplishing the same thing by abstracting the data from the tools used to process it? (RDBMS are much more UNIX-like in their approach than OO DBMS). Can't you write a perl script to take that data, pipe it out as text to STDOUT and then pipe that through Awk, Sed, etc. if you really want (for backwards compatibility).
In fact the only thing that the text file gives you at this point is human readibility which is still important but IMO this should be weighed against the RDBMS approach...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Some people argue (as you have) that these come at the expense of ease of use, but that is only true for small (admittedly often consumer-oriented) problems. Without doubt, however, past certain threshold values of problem size and complexity, efficiency and flexibility (i.e. small and specialized teams of scriptable tools) drastically increase ease of use relative to other methods, not to mention time and expense to deployment.
I could not have put it better myself. Have you ever really tried to learn UNIX and Windows? The first three steps with Windows are easy. But as the complexity of the problems grows, the learning curve gets steeper and steeper. This is a horrible problem with Windows. Imagine playing find-the-dialog box 50 times in a row
With UNIX, the learning curve is very steep at first. But as the problems become more complex, the added difficulty becomes less because you already know *most* of the tools you will use to solve the problem. You can go read a man page or two and now you are ready to rock and roll. But it is harder to get there.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
IF you could afford your own PDP-11, then you were the king hobbist. Unix started out as someones fork of MULTACS and then progressed from there .
Tragek
A detailed technical differences list
alongwith a idealogical difference (eg
*BSD vs Linux) list would have been useful.
Any answer to this will probably be seen as a troll, but here is my attempt:
BSD:
1: Developers are brought to it because they are excited about trying to develop new ideas, and they are flattered when commercial vendors use their ideas in software.
2: Developers don't tend to be as willing to help newbie driver developers as they are in Linux. Not that this is good or bad, but it reflects a greater level of the RTFM mentality among the core developers.
3: Busineses see BSD as a starting point for building certain implimentations of things (TCP/IP, f. ex.)
Linux:
1: Many developers are drawn to Linux for a diversity of reasons including profit, sometimes technical innovation, sometimes just for fun.
2: Businesses see Linux as an attempt to undercut their competition because other businesses can't use their contributions as a reference for their proprietary implimentations.
3: The Linux community tends to be more grateful for the contributions of people with limited know-how regarding programming assistance. It is easier to get help regarding a driver you are developing and there is less of an RTFM attitute in the LKML. Not that this is good or bad, just that it is an observation.
Where things go from here:
I think that as Linux kills proprietary UNIX, that BSD will grow as well because there won't be the same sort of reverse incentive to contribute for commercial developers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
For 2 to come true, 1 would have to be "Steal BSD code". (SCO was never alive).
Don't reinvent the wheel.
Who has the courage to tell this to all the "me too" projects hosted on Sourceforge?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I disagree. Linux (the Kernel) has been available since about 1992 (roughly). (GNU much earlier @ 1984)
From the few reports I see online (like linux counter, RedHat, etc). One can guess there are about 22 million active Gnu/Linux installs out there. One could also guess 100 million or 50 thousand, it's a guesser's market out there. In any case, lets go with 22 million Gnu/Linux installations over 10 years for the system.
MacOS (BSD based) has been out for about two years and Apple claims over 7 million users, and from looking at the charts in the Stevenotes, the adoption rate has been accelerating rather nicely.
22mil/10yrs = 2.2mil new users per year for Gnu/Linux
7mil/2yrs = 3.5mil new users per year
And yes, a lot of people will argue that GNU/Linus is free and/or cheaper than Mac OS, and runs on lower cost hardware. But that argument is iinvalid. Do you drive the lowest cost car on the market? Do you live in a small tent? Do you only eat nothing but guel and vegetables? No. You drive the most capable and stylish car you could afford, you live in the largest housing you can afford in the best area you can afford and that is reasonably close to where you generally want to be, and you probably eat rather well.
Why do people think that computer users (home desktop users) are suddenly going to ignore style, usability and convenience when choosing a desktop operating system? Price only becomes a factor once the other factors are met or balanced, and Mac OS X will run on $800 hardware(new eMac) quite nicely.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
That's were things like CORBA, RPC (and like DCOP), come into play. Sort of a higher-level pipe.
...but is Linus a eunuch?
??
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Woah... Not me, bud. I'll let someone else do it. But, you know... If we stay in the vicinity, the fireworks ought to be interesting!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Did you read the OP?
He already *said* it's dying, what more do you want, an obituary?
It's a quote of the freely available Unix-Haters Handbook. I made a remark on the quote when the an article on the book was posted on Slashdot. I was not able to find it back, unfortunately, mostly because there were so many dupes of that article on Slashdot.