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OSS Unix: Dividing & Conquering Itself
(Score.5, Interestin writes "Security guru Marcus Ranum has some interesting thoughts about how a continuing lack of consistency among Unix systems (and particularly Linux) is hurting Linux (and remaining commercial Unix vendors like Sun) and helping Microsoft. Admittedly this has been said before, but no-one else quite manages to phrase things the way Marcus can."
http://www.olene.net/linux.html
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
And get a windowing system that can be tuned to be efficient if one so desires.
Bloody 'ell!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
he's right.
I've been kicking around Unix and Windows systems for as long as he has, both as a network and system administrator and more recently as a journalist, and while the techie side of me cares passionately about distribution performance and the like, I also know that what the real world cares about is: 1) Does it work and 2) Do I have to learn anything new about how it works.
That's it.
Anything, anything, that gets in the way of getting the job done with the least amount of training gets in the way of adoption.
That's why efforts like the LSB are so darn important. ISVs, CIOs, CTOs and customers, don't want to care about whether you're running Red Hat or Novell/SUSE, KDE or GNOME, they just want to stick the disk in and have the program run. Period. End of statement.
We, as techies, may love to argue and fuss over every last detail--file system fights anyone?--but operating systems are just like cars. While gearheads love tinkering with every last detail of their automobiles, most people just want to get in their car and drive.
Windows may splutter and be prone to accidents, but you just drive it.
Until Linux and the other open source operating systems stop requiring people to turn the starter crank, let out the choke, and pump the gas pedal three times before starting--with each distribution requiring a slighly difference sequence--Windows will continue to dominate the desktop.
Darn it.
Steven
Who needs an enemy when you can divide and conquer yourself?
I survived the UNIX wars, unlike most of the companies involved in them. In their day, Pyramid, SCO, Apollo, DEC, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Gould and others fought ferocious scorched-earth wars trying to win customers' minds and money. The survivors, with the exception of Sun (a.k.a., The last man standing), have either disappeared into the mists of time, or are niche players that have been forced into new markets in order to survive. Other than their conflict, what did they have in common?
They were all selling some kind of UNIX operating system.
Back in the UNIX wars, the vendors had two primary axes on which they could compete: hardware speed, and features of their flavor of UNIX. Toward the end of the UNIX wars, a third battle evolved, over the desktop metaphor, the look and feel of the workstations' GUI. If you were around back then, you'll remember the ferocious fights over whether or not the 3D-look widgets of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) Motif metaphor were just flash and glitter or whether they were actually kind of cool.
Today, few remember the argument, and the code in question would be considered remarkably tight and lightweight compared to what people now use. If you step back and look at the UNIX wars from a high altitude, the actual battlefield was very small - GUIs and features in a UNIX operating system don't really sway customers much. The vendor who won, Sun, did so because they offered a consistent software experience (SunOs, later Solaris) across a broad spectrum of hardware at different performance levels from desktop to data center. In other words, the customers didn't care if the GUI had a 3D look and feel as long as it was fast, reliable, and affordable. A lot of users got sick of the debate and switched to a public domain window manager (I used twm on all my DEC, Sun, and BSDI machines...) - opting out of the whole battle - because they valued a consistent software experience more than they valued cool 3D-looking widgets.
You don't need to be an advanced student of computer history to know what happened. While the UNIX vendors beat eachother up over what amounted to nitpicking details, another vendor offered the same consistent kind of software experiencea cross a broad spectrum of hardware, including laptops. I am referring, of course, to Microsoft/Intel. Through the exacting lens of 20/20 hindsight, it is clear that the UNIX vendors were short-sighted losers arguing over what to watch on the television and fighting for the remote control while the house burned down around them.
Now, read this carefully: I am not bashing Microsoft Windows. Nor am I bashing UNIX. As a UNIX system administrator with 20+ years experience, and a Windows system administrator since Windows 1.0, I can tell you that there isn't a whole lot of difference in the work-load of efficiently running either environment. Sure, there are lots of annoying details in either environment, but it takes about the same time for an expert to load and configure a system. In the old days, UNIX machines were faster to bring online because of the prevalence of decent tape drives while Windows was primarily loaded by floppy - but that's about the only distinguishing factor I can recall. In other words, customers didn't choose Windows because it was better (or worse) than UNIX; they did it because Microsoft/Intel was careful to guarantee them a consistent software experience across a broad selection of hardware. Equally important, application developers flocked to that consistent software experience because it meant their products were cheaper to develop without the headaches of version-specific differences.
In 1985, when I wrote code for my UNIX machine, it worked on all the other UNIX machines because there was basically a single flavor of UNIX, which all used the same compiler, and everything just worked. Today, you actually have to be quite careful if you want to write code that compiles and works correctly on S