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Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensing
An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")
I've thought they've ended this flame war several years ago?
Well then, here we go, let the flaming commence...
Wow,
he couldn't have pushed the "Linux succeeded because BSD had legal troubles" thing any harder
What was that? Three mentions of it?
I don't personally agree, I think Linux succeeded on it's own merit, but anyhow
No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T at a crucial time.
Having lived thru that, I'd disagree. BSD was way too elitist, "oh, you wanna run a BSD flavor on a 386? Oh how cute, but you suck. We all use PDP11s here. We'll let you try, if you promise not to pester us with bug reports and things, now here's a nickel kid, go buy youself a real computer like a VAX.". Minix wanted you to buy a book and the hardware support was kinda limited so its unclear if you'd be wasting your money or not, which in the pre-amazon days meant finding out the ISBN and pestering an intimidating bookstore clerk to order it for you and then rolling the dice once it arrived. Linux? That was just some downloads off the local BBSes and/or early internet provider link, and everyone was mostly friendly most of the time, unlike the *BSD guys.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The reasons may also be more to do with Linux and the way it was run! Early hackers have noted that they preferred BSD, but could not use it due to lack of dual booting, this would have meant deleting windows which may have been needed for work. It was also easier for aspiring hackers to contribute to Linux, you didn't have to be one of the inner circle to contribute. There was also a lack of politics, persons within the rival operating systems had noted and open differences which would have affected work.
Minix was my first experience with a Unix-like OS (on my original IBM Personal Computer). It was a wonderful starting point to lead on to bigger and better things.
I'm sure he knows more about operating system design than I will ever even want to know, but he knows jack shit about why Linux succeeded and it has nothing to do with lawsuits against BSDi, which in turn has nothing to do with BSD-4.4-lite, upon which all free *BSDs are based (and so is OSX, for that matter, although it may still retain code from BSD-4.3 for all I know, via NeXTStep.)
Linux succeeded because of the GPL, plain and simple. It had less than a year's start before 386BSD, which was not affected by the lawsuit.
Tanenbaum will say anything to make himself sound like less of a douche for placing such strident restrictions on Minix and thus killing it, and so he wants to take anything away from Linux that he possibly can. If he has to ignore history to do so, so be it. Thankfully there's Wikipedia.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't understand how one can say BSDI suit could do anything much for Linux. The suit did not preclude the creation of FreeBSD/NetBSD and thus Linux and BSD both had opportunity. If the claim is that BSDI lent some sort of credibility/support, during that time Linux had none of that either (Red Hat didn't even technically have an offering until 94, and I would say it wasn't worth taking seriously until '97 or so).
Whatever went 'right' for Linux and 'wrong' for BSD had nothing to do with that suit.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Let me be clear, the *BSDs WERE based on 386BSD which is why it's relevant, and they therefore still are (sort of) but they've inherited code from 4.4-BSD-lite since.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought Tanenbaum was the name of a German Christmas carol (sung to the tune of "The Red Flag')
Linux was behind, but generally expressed a more practical set of sensibilities that caused the relevant bits to catch up and pass BSD a bit quickly.
All of them sucked on driver support, but I seem to recall Linux tending to getting more drivers more quickly than BSD. Some of the quality was less than stellar, but there was a willingness to go with something that mostly worked and refine it in the larger community. This sort of approach was pretty well required to work as a software platform running without the cooperation of the hardware platform you are on.
GPL may have scared off companies in the beginning and maybe even a few to this day, but the value of companies that would reject GPL and embrace BSD is rather low to the community. GPL forced the companies that *did* use it to contribute back. BSD-only companies felt any and all work they did was theirs and theirs alone and BSD upstream didn't benefit. Over time, it's snowballed and most successful companies cannot ignore the benefits of Linux. It may be common sense now that their is lower maintenance cost of submitting it upstream even if not required by license, but had GPL never made waves, the 'keep your code to yourself or else' mindset may have persisted.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The *BSD community has been painted as being "elitist" for well over 20 years now. But that's just not the case. It's a merely a community that's built around a meritocracy. They don't care who you are, or where you're from, or what your experience is, just as long as you have skill. That's all they ask for, and that's actually quite reasonable. That's why the *BSD operating systems are so damn solid; they're built by very talented developers who know exactly what they're doing.
Those who call them "elitist" are often people who asked what are in fact very, very stupid or basic questions. These are the sort of questions that are answered in FAQs, or in the software's documentation, or these days easily found using a web search.
If you have a legitimate question, the *BSD community will be very eager and very quick to help you out. They take the quality of their software very seriously, so if you've found a legitimate problem, then they will work their asses off to resolve it. But you not knowing that "cd" is the command used to change directories isn't such a problem. If you ask that, then you should expect to be mistreated, because you are being ignorant, and you're wasting their time. They could be looking into a real problem or creating some important new functionality, rather than answering your question (which you could easily look up the answer to yourself in less time than it took you to ask the question in the first place).
There's no debate any longer. It's quite clear that BSD-style licenses promote freedom, while the GPL goes out of its way to remove freedom.
That kind of depends who you are and whose freedoms you're concerned with, actually. GPL promotes certain types of freedom, where BSD goes with the idea that "freedom" means "no restrictions whatsoever". I dont think theres a clear cut "this one is more free" because both are certainly correct uses of the word "freedom".
The GPL license is all about limiting the freedom of people to do what they want with the software.
Come on, you know better than this. The GPL compromises the freedoms of future developers in order to guarentee that the end user at LEAST has the freedom to modify and redistribute.
Wikipedia sums it up well:
The distribution rights granted by the GPL for modified versions of the work are not unconditional. When someone distributes a GPL'd work plus his/her own modifications, the requirements for distributing the whole work cannot be any greater than the requirements that are in the GPL.
In a stricter sense BSD IS about maximizing freedom in the sense of anarchy; but US' society was formed with the idea that in order to maximize individual freedoms when groups are involved, you need to do so by setting restrictions (Bill of Rights, enforcing contract law, enforcing theft laws, etc). You lose some freedoms (the ability for a congressperson to vote on a speech law, the ability for you to take Bob's lunch) in order to gain a more stable, guarenteed level of freedom (being secure in your home, being able to agree to an enforceable contract, being guarenteed the right to political speech).
I've been dual booting on FreeBSD since 1996 when I first learned about FreeBSD, a few years into the project. Just because you're clueless and can't read documentation doesn't mean other people can't succeed where you failed.
Tanenbaum finally decides he wants to rule the world after shooing people away for 20 years.
But maybe his timing turned out to be right after all, as the hardware is now fast enough to support a microkernel OS (obviously, because VMware runs with acceptable performance on Windows laptops).
It requires the same amount of effort to politely redirect someone to the appropriate place, without mistreating the "ignorant". They are ignorant, because they don't know, they are trying to learn, but instead of being helpful, you turn to being abusive? I wouldn't call someone like that elitist, I'd simply call them an asshole.
Try doing a simple modification to the MINIX kernel like adding a new system call. The new system call doesn't even have to do anything interesting or touch hardware: just add some numbers and return them, for the sake of argument or something. Last I tried in MINIX this required touching something like 6 or 7 different files in the source. There are a lot of different components in the kernel that need to know about the new system call, which component it gets forwarded to, how to package up the message to send to that server. I think Linus is bang on when he says microkernels add complexity on to the interactions between components, which is where the worst of the complexity was to begin with.
Linux does run every component of the kernel in the same address space, which has its downsides (a buggy video driver can theoretically affect your network driver), but I haven't seen these downsides come up in practice. Truth be told, if one of your drivers crashes, there's little hope of maintaining a useful system and you'll likely want to reboot anyway.
As far as AST's assertion that Linux is "spaghetti" code, no no no, look at the code for yourself. The components in Linux are very well separated. Linux keeps them separated by coding discipline rather than by some technical enforcement (like different address spaces), but this discipline is kept up very well. I suspect the high-level Linux developers (like Linus) spend a lot of time and effort tracking people down and yelling at them for breaking this discipline and trying to put in some spaghetti, but in my dealings with the kernel, they've done a very good job of staying disciplined. I haven't come across anything in the Linux kernel that I'd call "spaghetti".
Back to the example of adding a system call, I think in Linux this requires 3 source files that need to change. I've only spent a few weeks on each of them, but in my experiences, Linux has the edge on MINIX when it comes down to keeping components logically separated. In Linux, what you do in one place, no other code ever needs to know about that. In MINIX, you have to worry about how and where to forward messages and, while it is sort of elegant in its design, but I don't see an actual benefit coming out of it.
from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/elitist
(of a person or class of persons) considered superior by others or by themselves, as in intellect, talent, power, wealth, or position in society: elitist country clubbers who have theirs and don't care about anybody else.
Game, set, match?
I find it hard to believe that the lawsuit had much impact. GNU/Linux has had the success it's had because it's made UNIX easier on top of being free, in both senses of the word. BSD has been around for a long time and is still with us, but in terms of usability it's still light years behind Linux. Sure there's been some decent attempts at it such as PC-BSD but they're still lacking. NetBSD may be well designed and correctly programmed from an academic point of view and obviously one of its strengths is the sheer number of platforms it runs on but it's just painful to use. The biggest thing that irks me about the BSDs, is a complete lack of decent package management and decent installers that do most of the hard work for you. Sure I can manually partition a system as good as the next guy, set up swap space, compile the software I need, mess about getting X configured etc but you know after a while that just gets dull and tiresome. Do the hard work for me and let me tweak where I need to.
When you came to BSD in 1996 you were five years late to the party, since 386BSD came out in 1991, and didn't support FDISK labels, preventing users from dual-booting. Indeed, early versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD, both of which grew from 386BSD, shared this lack. Linux used fdisk from the start (Linus not seeing a need for eight confusingly-identified partitions) which permitted dual-booting if you had partition slots free.
So you're being elitist, but ironically, not elitist enough to know what you are talking about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The license is really less important than community in making a project successful. What is important is a high pace of development and a large developer community, not whether a project uses the BSD or GPL licenses. In these cases, economically most commercial players will contribute most of their changes back.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How about figuring out how to cooperate more and make all open source platforms work together better, and compete better with closed-source/commercial platforms. Silly to forget windows and mac, and fight against each other, freebsd vs netbsd vs openbsd vs bsdi vs redhat vs ubuntu vs debian. It would be wonderful for developers if some practical, less labor intensive, way were reached about how to make apps run on all platforms.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
In hindsight, perhaps, this is all clear. At the time, would you have bet your house on the proposition of 386BSD remaining unscathed if the BSDi lawsuit had come to a different outcome? But wait, I have a reference.
From Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution:
Yeah, totally clear how 386BSD was free and clear of the legal fog of war. And a huge debt owed by everyone to Marshall Kirk McKusick and friends who fought this battle on our behalf while Linux thrived under the legal radar.
In my own view, Linux had a crazy-making anthill culture, which appealed to many young coders with more energy than brains. But you know, I wouldn't bet against energy in retrospect. The annual ipchains rewrite boggled my mind. Not my cup of tea. An even crazier splinter group made hay with PHP, breaking just about every rule of thoughtfulness and elegance known to God and man. And look where that got them: pretty damn far.
I would personally, however, have jumped on the BSD wagon at the time had it been able to promote a coherent vision of life after lawsuit. What would be the balance be now if BSD had gathered twice as many elitist greybeards into the fold? I have a feeling it would have continued to lag in the department of crappy consumer product device drivers, compromising a major defection path from Windows 98. Greybeards don't do popularity worth a damn.
Debian zealots notwithstanding, Linux quickly became popular enough to become a willing host for binary blobs.
The GPL license is all about limiting the freedom of people to do what they want with the software.
Incompetent, cowardly troll is incompetent and cowardly; The GPL license is about limiting the freedom of programmers to do what they want with your copyrighted source code, specifically for the opposite of the purpose which you state; it is indeed there to prevent people from placing limits on what users may do with the software.
Try harder, weedhopper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Download Minix and you get a microkernel OS. Browsing the FTP site for packages and I see SSH, X, Vim, the make suite and Perl. It seems any actual useful programs are left as an exercise to the student.
Loads of education fun -- if I was stuck on a rocket to Jupiter and had a few years to kill reinventing the wheel. In Perl, none-the-less. *shudder*
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T at a crucial time. That's just dumb luck. Also, success is relative. I run a political website that ordinary people read. On that site statistics show that about 5% is Linux, 30% is Macintosh (which is BSD inside) and the rest is Windows. These are ordinary people, not computer geeks. I don't think of 5% as that big a success story. [AST]
I'm still convinced that it's one of those ideas that sounds nice on paper, but ends up being a failure in practice, because in real life the real complexity is in the interactions, not in the individual modules. And microkernels strive to make the modules more independent, making the interactions more indirect and complicated. The separation essentially ends up also cutting a lot of obvious and direct communication channels. [LBT]
Maybe the webserver itself is running Linux, though. As well as your home broadband router, prof. Tanenbaum! ...
I'm sad because of the short sight.
Linux is successfull (no quotes). This is a fact. Also Windows is (used to be) successful at some time.
Do you see Windows everywhere? Nope. Do you see Linux everywhere. Nope as well, but it's very, very popular.
Maybe it's not popular in desktops. But it is, indeed.
With the computing power available today, wasting a bunch of cycles in safer communication for microkernels is not a sin, Linus.
So, why being so harsh to each other?
I'm really convinced that Linus could help making Minix a better kernel. And the other way around as well.
So, please, Andy and Linus, stop it.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
All the cool kids started wearing Tux t-shirts. Linus Torvalds did interviews with the press, and it didn't hurt that he's somewhat photogenic. Wired Magazine said you weren't hip unless you ran Red Hat and had a frame relay connection to your house.
And then the startups in the 1990s didn't want to (or just couldn't) spend money on SUN boxes, so they found a "good enough" solution.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
Yes, people have mentioned a million times how much BSD has done for OS X. What has OS X done for BSD? On the desktop it's fallen off the map, it used to be listed at 0.01% at hitslink now it's nothing. Nobody uses just BSD and I strongly doubt anyone using OS X contributes much to BSD so that the next version of OS X will be better. That I think would have happened with or without Linux. At least on the server side there's a few using BSD as-is, perhaps we'd have a BAMP stack instead of a LAMP stack. But without all the corporate contributions I'd probably be more of a Win/Unix market with BSD as a simplistic, free server.
BSD depends on people and corporations that are willing to give, give and then give some more. Would Linux be where it is if everybody has constantly grabbed features to put in AIX, SCO (before they turned troll), Solaris, OS/2, MacOS, Windows and so on? No. The BSD license lacks the self-preservation to exist as an independent product, sure the code won't go away but all the users disappear on proprietary spin-offs and so too in essence all the potential developers. With or without Linux it'd end up just as libraries for products people actually use. Then you can pound your chest and say our BSD code is in the TCP/IP stack of Windows, while Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"We know that many companies find the GPL so unacceptable that they won't use Linux for that reason. In this regard we might become a small BSD-licensed Linux replacement."
BSD programmers around the world proudly proclaiming: Macintosh was me, it really was, promise....
Freedom to build a wall around other people's work. Freedom?
Linux kernel started in 1991. Lawsuit started in 1992 and settled in 1993. Linux kernel 1.0.0 was released in 1994.
Good to know that mature BSD was no match to Linux v.1.0.0.
Bullshit.
My experience with BSD development is that it comprises core teams of fairly smart geeks with tireless sycophants on the sidelines taken under the wings of the elders on the basis of their ability to suck up. This is why everything BSD beyond the kernel and a few specific userland apps is an also-ran.
And the BSD operating systems are "so damn solid" only in the sense that many parts are very mature and the pace of development is fairly slow, lagging well behind Linux for a good decade. This is not to say that stability isn't sometimes a good choice - which is why many people choose Debian.
Linux, meanwhile, is much more meritocratic. Your code good enough? We'll take it, even though we're not sure who you are. Big business wanting to contribute time, money and resources? We'll take it. Not up to scratch? We'll give you advice but we won't include you in anything mainline. Hell, we'll not only give you advice but we'll point you to the copious amount of documentation produced to help kernel and userland developers.
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
You'd think he's sore because Linux took his ball away.
Surely not? :-)
One of the main reasons Minix crashed and burned was the difficulty in getting the bloody thing. I have a copy of his book "Operating Systems, Design and Implementation", published by Prentice Hall INternational Editions in 1987. I bought a copy in 1990 as I was interested in Unix like operating systems. The prices listed for the Minix software at the end of the preface were out of date even then, Prentice Hall in the UK wanted about £140 for the IBM PC (640K) build and you had to fill out a rather odd invioce to get it.
Needless to say, I didn't proceed.
My requirements for a functioning Unix-like system were then filled by Coherent which was half the price and came with a really good printed manual. I've still got that too... Then in 1993 the MCC distro showed what could be done; that and Slackware launched the Linux revolution as far as I was concerned. Minix got left behind - it was irrelevant. I downloaded the Minix 2 installs some time ago but I've never installed them on a system.
Now even hippies agree that is freedom! (And if you ever find a way to shove a Gnu anywhere, I, personally, don't want to know about it).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I remember Tanenbaum saying that he uses Windows because Photoshop does not run properly on Linux. Come on, really? I bet he uses Photoshop all day to make rage comics. At least the Linux folks eat their own dog food and actually use Linux. While Tanenbaum runs Minix in a VM.
A few years later I heard somewhere (May have been Wired) about this spiffy new Linux operating system. By then I had a (more or less) stable internet connection and the instructions were quite easy; download 20-some-odd slakware diskettes from Sunsite and you were in business. Nothing was mentioned about BSD. So I downloaded 20-some-odd diskettes from Sunsite and I was in business.
At least in my case, Linux won out over BSD largely due to marketing and the easy distribution method. No one every really talked about BSD, and Linux worked brilliantly for me, so I used Linux.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I call bullshit on your bullshit.
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad. Of course the pace of development is slower with *BSD they're actually developing entire OSes rather than just using the work of hundreds of independent projects to cobble together an OS. That takes time, but it's also why you can install the base OS and not have to worry about breaking your install by updating your software. The software is by and large separate from the core OS, protecting it from the common interference you see in Linux.
As for also rans, you act like that isn't a problem for Linux, OSX, Android and Windows as well.
As for metitocratic, you ought to provide some sort of evidence to support your claim. Unlike Linux, there's a much larger group of people that are authorized to make those decisions and by and large they do so well. There are occasionally regressions, but because the OS is both stable and mature, I can't recall the last time I ran into one that I actually noticed.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers. Chances are that if there isn't a driver that it's a crap card and certainly not by a manufacturer that takes networking seriously. In practice I don't recall ever having had a computer for which the network card wasn't supported out of the box.
Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these. hell if these numbers were from a company after TWENTY years of trying they'd be Chap 11 by now. No what Linux need extremely badly is a LEADER, someone with real vision and drive that will say "Ya know what? this is unacceptable. i'm not gonna accept 2%, hell I'm not gonna accept 5%. I'm not gonna quit until Ballmer and Cook are sitting at their desks looking at the numbers and thinking to themselves "WTF is this shit? How did THAT happen?" and Linux machines are in every damned store on the planet making both nervous as hell".
Like it or not there was a reason why guys like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison ended up on the top of the heap, and that was because they simply wouldn't settle. They would have never accepted numbers that low and then had articles written about their "success' they would have considered it a personal insult, found out what the competitors were doing to beat them, and then came out with something better and stomped the shit out of them.
As a retailer i'd love to see that day happen, i remember when there was a half a dozen different OSes and nearly as many CPUs to run them on, but that day will never get here if you continue on this path. Take that link and put in ANY date you want, you'll see the numbers are damned near flatline. Expecting the world to change and suddenly want to become geeker heavy and learn all about how the guts work just ain't gonna happen, see the iShiny or win 7 which your average 6 year old would probably have no problem running.
The way I see it there is really only two choices here, change or don't change. if you change and embrace consumers and give them what they want? You might seriously have a shot. you run faster on lower powered hardware, you don't force the user to get a new machine just to run the latest version and nobody else will be able to go lower even if you charged $5 for the OS it would still undercut anything MSFT has.
If you don't want to change that is your choice, then you'll just have to settle for a maximum of low single digits and the fact the vast majority of the planet is gonna ignore you. the OEMs, the retailers, and the users will all pretty much not care that you exist at all. but you can't eat your cake and have it too, because after 20 years the numbers clearly show you will never get the world to do things "your way" or act like you want them to. Business 101 give the customer something they want to buy and the numbers clearly show Linux hasn't done that, so I don't see how anybody can call less than 2% success. That is including the BSDs and other OSes BTW.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Do you think for a second that the likes of IBM would *ever* have contributed back to FreeBSD if that had been the 'winner'? No way, they would have taken it for themselves and kept it private. For the early life of linux, this was largely a moot point as the community was largely comprised of enthusiasts and the logistics of how the community was managed mattered more than licensing, but as things progressed into the 2000s, the GPL did have an impact as more and more commercial users were forced to adopt a particular behaviour with respect to contributions.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Tanenbaum: These grapes are so very sour.
What a baby! I was once impressed by his move to create an alternative to commercial unices, but now I just want this guy to go away play with his own toys. Typical elitist academic.
Honesty? From the GP post:
It is Microsoft that (effectively) offered a free operating system to the proles. More accurately, they force every desktop user who buys a PC to buy their OS, and if they want to use something else it is additional effort. So the "proles" use Windows because they already bought it, it is already installed, and they wouldn't know how to replace it even if they knew they had an option.
You mention IBM, and then go on to quote desktop user numbers. You can't possibly believe that IBM donated money to help improve the desktop user experience. Now go look up some real numbers, to wit the server numbers, and get back to me. On second thought, don't bother to get back to me. I accept your apology.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
I have to say your right on the money with that statement. One of the things that made Linux so attractive was Linus et el put a lot of effort in allowing people to add driver support for hardware. It stands to reason making an OS for machines people slap together themselves you need to be able to quickly add support for a multitude of hardware. This alone is a huge reason for the success of Linux. The BSD developers on the other hand, had a clear idea of what hardware they wanted to support -- big ass servers -- so the means to support "oh look a new graphics card" type new hardware was low priority and never built in.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Linux doesn't insist on anything.
Unless you are some clueless granny who only ever clicks on the OK button, you really have no excuse for a Linux installer not doing exactly what you want.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Linux would insist upon using a large number of partitions.
That is a steamingly incredible crock of shit, since:
(a) partition decisions are the purview of the installer, not the kernel, and
(b) even back in the day you could install everything on / . It just wasn't recommended due to the small size of HDDs.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Linux would insist upon using a large number of partitions.
For values of "large" that include "one".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
You realise that a large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux, right? and that the porting to Linux part typically involves copying things that are in the generic part of the 802.11 stack on *BSD into the driver?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's easy to understand.
BSD::GNU as Somalia::USA.
Mods: this is flamebait, not troll.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If they want to be assholes, they obviously don't "want" users.
There is no reason they should want to need users when they are working to scratch their own itch. Mere users don't contribute anything to the OS.
As a user, however, I don't need them either.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I started on Linux, too (about 1997). And one time (in 1998), I've been talking with a colleague about licenses. I told him, I really don't care if someone uses my code, I just don't want to get sued, if they use it wrong. He told me that I might be more compatible with the "BSD philosophy" instead of GNU's GPL. And he was correct. I informed myself about it and landed on FreeBSD (in 2001), because of the fantastic application support ("FreeBSD ports collection").
Now, I'm trying to use Linux from time to time (almost every year I try it), but it has nothing to offer for me and it lacks some basic features that are included in FreeBSD and which I really need.
The simple answer (and probably one of the more correct answers) is GNU/Linux won because it works. I love BSD, especially OpenBSD. I buy OpenBSD's CD's to contribute money to the project because I admire the hell out of it, but rarely do I try to run it. OpenSSH? Amazing. And that it came from such a relatively small group, just shows what a complete powerhouse the OpenBSD group is. However, when I got my OpenBSD CD's in the mail, I figured let's do the twice-a-year dance where I attempt to run OpenBSD. Results? On my primary workstation, OpenBSD's X doesn't agree with my video card. On my primary laptop, though I can get OpenBSD to install via CD, once installed, it doesn't recognize my DVD drive, and on my EEE machine, it doesn't recognize my wireless. Now, let's look at one of my favorite GNU/Linux distros, Trisquel. Which uses the linux-libre "deblobbed" kernel. It works, flawlessly, on my workstation and both laptops. Zero un-free drivers, blobs, or software. People can come up with as many theories on why GNU/Linux overshadowed BSD, but in my case, and in the case of many, GNU/Linux works better. BSD might have more elegant, bug free code, but for the vast majority of users, that doesn't matter, working features matter.
You can still try a BSD if you want to. Drives are cheap and the install doesn't even take a half gig of RAM like the Ubuntu spawn. BSD has also come a long way from the days it was perpetually behind Linux in development. You might like it, it's quite professional and they seem to have left behind the ridiculous infighting that was characteristic in the past. Now it's no more fractious than any typical Linux group and less so than, say, the Gentoo thing or the whole Unity mess.
Those like Mr. Stallman have gripes about the BSD license but they don't run my show. If you want to take your ball and go home be my guest; you're free too.
It had to do with the personality of the respective 'owners'.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad.
Not "bad", but so elitist and cliquish that they fell way behind Linux for reasons other than "lawyers". Easier to blame that gang of non-techies over there rather than cleaning up your own house, isn't it?
to cobble together an OS
Don't let your bias shout too loudly. Also, why the disdain for groups which actually try to build an OS for the applications rather than for the benefit of their own ego? MS knows who they need to cater to and so does Linus.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers.
You're missing the point entirely. Linux kernel developers have made it much easier than BSD developers for others to write drivers - whether "the vast majority of manufacturers" or interested third parties. There's still the problem of API stability vs Windows but this is more an engineering decision (GPL v2 allows for a community to keep things agile rather than relying on legacy bloat) than a personality one (BSD's "if you aren't already core or protege then you should be able to divine from the source what counts as part of the stable public API and any changes we make, so fuck you!").
This argument is academic: the different philosophies and the resultant success of Linux have been played out magnificently over the past two decades. BSD is where it is only through inertia and a few first class isolated projects (e.g. openssh).
This has nothing to do with anarchy. BSDL is simply protecting the developer's rights and this is most essential part of a license. A developer does not like to be sued, if someone gets shot in the foot while using a piece of software. And nothing is further enforced on the users of the software.
You don't install everything on / because you want it to be static and non-changing so a crash doesn't take it out due to corruption and you have a bootable partition with your recovery utilities on it.
You want / to be small so it gets checked and mounted quickly.
You don't put everything on / because all activity anywhere on the disk can easily corrupt the entire partition (well, theories and all that). You also take advantage of partitioning to ensure things like logging silly errors from cron doesn't fill up the disk and take the system down, especially when you had OSes like Linux that would corrupt the every living fuck out of their filesystems when they were filled.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So now he moves from MINIX vs Linux to Linux vs BSD?
"I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years."
Although he is saying this now, his primary point of not accepting LINUX was the monolithic kernel which he used to call "bloat". This was the one of the primary reason he and his students conceived MINIX that was based on microkernel design principles. Now that the "bloated" kernel is so popular, he has probably realized that microkernels (although sound technically elegant) weren't the right fit in today's Desktop OS.
BSD or LINUX both are monolithic, why change your stand?
Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these
Desktops are a not the only sort of computer platform, though they are the most difficult for a newcomer to penetrate. People want every piece or hardware and software from the past ten years to just work. It's really difficult to do unless you have OEM's and dev's in on the process, and that's really hard to do unless people already have a lot of desktops with the OS (chicken and egg problem).Though Linux has surely though slowly been doing this.
When it comes to embedded systems, supercomputers or servers you only need to be compatible with one or two of the more popular models in each hardware category and run the special purpose software that people buy such machines for. Linux dominates these three platforms, and BSD has a good showing in server sector.
Anyways 2% of the public at large is a huge number, and I think canonical has a viable model. Piece together free software so it works, and make money by using the OS as a platform where you can buy media and applications.
I've thought they've ended this flame war several years ago?
Several years ago when BSD based Mac OS X took over the Unix desktop market? ;-)
I think things are a little more complicated than in the 1990s with respect to BSD vs Linux.
At this moment, I cannot install fedora core 16 without it wiping my entire disk, because 'it does not recognize my partitions'. It wants to live on one big partition of type 'GPT' (Guid based partitioning), and damn everyone else !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Linus Torvalds himself says the same thing - that if it weren't for the BDSI lawsuits, he would have just used BSD.
That is not the same thing. Torvalds is saying Linux likely would not have existed. That doesn't mean the success of Linux is correlated to the temporarily hamstrung BSD, that simply means Linux may not have had an opportunity to succeed if BSD was not hamstrung because it would not have existed.
No, the most enthusiastic Linux developer and hobbyist is saying he would have spent his time somewhere else if BSD were available. Other early developers would have had similar behaviors. The pool of people willing to work on Linux would have been severely diminished. In other words, there would not have been a vacuum for Linux to fill.
Once copyright expires there is no difference and copyright takes to long to expire. Should be less than ten years. GPL is only as strong as copyright is, and is designed to turn the paradigm of copyright against itself, hence copyleft.
Additionally killing babies isn't part of freedom because freedom is a social condition where 100% of people control 100% of their property 100% of the time.
Anyways the right licence depends on what you want to make and how you want it to be used.
I'm fairly sure Linux has a generic 802.11 stack, and I have not idea why it would behave in a significantly different manner. Starting drivers in BSD I would guess is to avoid GPL issues
Take over the world?
> I am too modest for that.
I don't think so.
> One thing I would like is that when
> microkernels take over the world, which I fully expect,
yes... for the 2 big microkernels:
-> microsoft have big trouble porting to arm.
-> os is no stable as jobs sell it.
> is that we at least get a footnote.
footnote? LOL.
> Many hypervisors are getting more and more functionality
> over time until they are indistinguishable from a microkernel, only not designed well.
hypervisor is a lot different to a OS; i think mr. tanenbaum should know it.
> With the Android people [more code into user space,]
i think it's no so obvious.
> and Microsoft moving more and more code into user space, we are also moving in that direction. ... :)
yes. and microsoft is going to own the world
Why should linux target the consumer market? Leave it to Apple and Android devs to develop computer appliances for the mass market. Linux is for people that take computing seriously. Not to say that that's all it's good for or that's all its users are interested in, but if you don't have an ideological chip on your shoulder and aren't interested in the command line, you're probably better off just using whatever came on the box you bought. Until Apple, there was no interest from the Unix community in the consumer segment, and the degree of consumer that consumer OSs enjoy is inversely related to their Unix components.
There's a lot of people I would recommend linux to, and many tasks for which it is an (arguably) superior option. Freedom from viruses is worth a great deal to me, as someone who has spent years repairing fucked up Windows systems. But I'm not eager for that particular advantage to erode, and I've dealt with far too many windows-using idiots to wish that upon the linux community.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Soon after 386BSD came out, FreeBSD and NetBSD (the two major ones I remember) created forks with their own leadership and separate kernel trees. This caused a fragmentation of both the user base and driver developer base, with people being "FreeBSD people" or "NetBSD people". I think this is what killed BSD. A lot of people were familiar with BSD from university, and that gave it good initial momentum. Linux had one leader, one tree. There was no doubt who the authority was and where the "one true tree" lived.
In my case I started with 386BSD pretty much as soon it was available, having been weened on 4.3BSD in university. Then FreeBSD became the lead platform for x86 and NetBSD went multi-architecture. Meanwhile Linux, which seemed like a student project at the time (I guess it was!) seemed irrelevant, as why would you want to reinvent UNIX when BSD was an 'ftp get' away? It would take Linux a few years to attain parity with BSD in terms of kernel features, but that didn't matter. One tree. One direction. No confusion. Also, although I don't have direct experience, I always got the impression the BSD teams were pretty cliquey (sp?) and a bit full of themselves, whereas I got the impression (again, not first hand) that Linus was more open to accepting help.
Almost 20 years later the only remnant of FreeBSD in my life is the coffee mug I bought from Walnut Creek CDROM. My professional life has been on Linux for at least 10 years.
The point is that, contrary to hedwards' delusions, Linux does not insist on large number of partitions.
How many partitions, and for what purpose, is left to the "sysadmin".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
FC16 is not Linux, you mewling ninny.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"Being ahead of your time is never good. I published a paper in 1978 on something very close to the Java Virtual Machine, but we never got much credit for it although we were years ahead of Sun." Huh... Classic example of a sore loser. Nothing more, nothing less.
To the best of my knowledge, the ath5k/madwifi drivers are the only Linux drivers to be ported from the BSDs (OpenBSD/FreeBSD) to Linux. Which other drivers out of the 56 Linux wifi drivers were ported from the BSDs to qualify the "large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux" statement?
Linux has had its own 802.11 stack called mac802.11 since the 2.6.22 kernel four years ago which was developed by Devicescape. The only driver I know of that carried a (Net)BSD 802.11 stack over to Linux was madwifi which had net802.11, was never mainline and was superseded by ath5k... The madwifi driver never went mainline, nor did its net802.11 stack. Why do you think that the 802.11 stack from a BSD needs copying into a Linux driver when mac802.11 exists?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm fairly sure Linux has a generic 802.11 stack
The mac80211 stack? It's not "generic" enough to handle "FullMAC" devices (devices where the Media Access Control (MAC) Sublayer Management Entity (MLME) is handled by the device's hardware or firmware), but, as they say, "FullMAC devices have become scarce". I don't know whether any of the *BSD's 802.11 stacks handle both FullMAC and SoftMAC adapters; if so, those *BSDs have a more generic 802.11 stack, but if, as the mac80211 people note, there aren't many FullMAC devices (which I suspect means "there are few if any newer FullMAC devices", i.e. newer devices will leave the MLME to the OS), that's not a big difference these days.
and I have not idea why it would behave in a significantly different manner.
Because it was developed independently, and its developers had their own ideas about how things should be done (whether those ideas were "this is better", "Not Invented Here", or a combination of the two)?
In 1992, the ability to put Linux on its own partitiion and have it coexist with DOS on a single physical drive was the *ENTIRE* reason why I originally decided to go with Linux instead of 386BSD, which was also freely available at the time, even though BSD offered considerably more functionality than Linux during that period.
It had absolutely squat to do with lawsuits.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Pretty sure it's anger derived from an obvious display of laziness, by expecting someone else to take their time to explain something the user should have researched before diving into a new operating system.
We know that many companies find the GPL so unacceptable that they won't use Linux for that reason. In this regard we might become a small BSD-licensed Linux replacement.
We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time.
If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI), Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the world.
Many companies refuse to make major investments in modifying Linux to suit their needs if they have to give the code to their competitors.
Clearly some companies are willing to do this but I also know of quite a few companies that refuse to use Linux for this reason.
No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T at a crucial time. That's just dumb luck.
Yes, I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.
I have seen reports on market share in the embedded world. Linux isn't winning it at all. About 30% have no operating system and another 30% have a home-brew operating system.
Last, but certainly not least,
Finaly what are your dream for MINIX? Take over the world?
I am too modest for that.
Is he trolling nerds the world around, or is he seriously still this butthurt over Linux's success?
Tanenbaum's a troll, and Minix is irrelevant. Nothing to see here, move along.
Yup, the BSD ports at the time still had the goofy BSD way of partitioning. Ok, not really so goofy if you assumed you owned the entire disk and you understood it's history but a head scratcher to home computer hobbyists.
Right... That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently. These days, people have stopped caring about a little performance one way or the other, but it's utterly ridiculous to claim FreeBSD lags "a good decade" behind Linux... In fact it leads Linux often enough.
ZFS vs Btrfs seems like a good contemporary example.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Meta: What is your opinion of 386BSD?
.. and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. link
Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available
Gaah?
1. Linux has a *full* "generic" 802.11 stack.
2. Licensing issues will most likely prevent you from copying "BSD" parts into Linux, unless the original author allowed for dual GPL / BSD licensing (and I doubt it)
Could you please list a number of card that have been ported from FreeBSD w/ parts of the FreeBSD's 802.11 stack?
- Gilboa
You got modded down because you make ridiculous claims based on a tenuous grasp on reality. If Windows was free, then the money paid to OEMs for trialware could be reflected in the price and the machine would cost less. The money goes to Microsoft, because Windows is by no means free, and any claim that it is free reflects either an absurd lack of ability to understand logic and reality or a clear act of trolling. The only question anyone should have is if you should be modded down as -1 Troll or -1 Overrated.
The 1990s called ... they want your assessment of the Linux community back.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It IS free as the cost of Win 7 HP has been published several times, it is $15 a copy. Now the reason ALL the home machines are loaded up with trialware is they get PAID to put in the trialware. Now if you wish to stick your head in the sand and go "la la la free as in beer" that is your choice but it isn't exactly a secret that Win 7 starter is $8 a copy and HP is $15, which is why the OEMs are only obligated to give you that amount back and not the retail price if you refuse the license.
Oh and 2011 called, it wants you to pull your head out your ass and smell the shit your shoveling. Do you REALLY want me to provide citations? Because I can you know. i can literally wallpaper the whole page with link after link after link of failure on the part of Linux. failure with drivers, massive returns, security issues, hell I could probably come up with 60 links in under 20 minutes if you'd like. Would you like that? just ask. of course last time I did that all I got was "TL:DR" which is of course the communities way of going "la la la free is in freedom!"
So if you want citations by all means just ask, i'll be happy to give you a solid page of links, all saying the same thing I've been saying, that Linux doesn't work. it doesn't work for consumers, don't work in retail, its numbers have been DECREASING in servers, from a high of 36% down to just 22% last numbers I saw, I'd be happy to post them for you if you'd like. But don't worry you can go back to patting yourselves on the back for a job not done, but don't complain when all the hardware manufacturers won't give you drivers and Windows locks you out with secureboot, because it will be your own fault.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
PLONK
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.
Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).
just a ghost in the machine.
At this moment, I cannot install fedora core 16 without it wiping my entire disk, because 'it does not recognize my partitions'.
Fedora is the alpha test version for RHEL. You are getting what you are asking for.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right... That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently.
You mean, once FreeBSD got SMP, in 1999? Three years behind Linux? You're right, that's not a decade, but it's still poor.
ZFS vs Btrfs seems like a good contemporary example.
It's a good example of Sun poisoning the well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
BSD::GNU as Somalia::USA.
Mods: this is flamebait, not troll.
you're going to have to explain yourself if you want to be taken seriously on that last statement :p
(And seriously, I'm dying to know your "logic")
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let us all just use minux. End of teh debate and use minux. It is all encompasing and superior,
For a complete counter example, try USB support. Now that was a nightmare...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm fairly sure Linux has a generic 802.11 stack, and I have not idea why it would behave in a significantly different manner. Starting drivers in BSD I would guess is to avoid GPL issues
You know the source is available for you to check this if you want.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
The more one reads about other free Unixens out there, the more one realizes that Linux was one bad design from the start, and Linus and his (IBM-sponsored) crew just stuck to it, it being more of the same again and again...
I'm sorry, but I have to agree with the non-Linux fanboys - there wasn't much in it that was innovative, and it nurtured a cultured of bad design and bad execution - Gnome, Debian, etc. ad nauseum.
Let's face it, Linux was never as interesting as the *BSDs, Minix 3 or what Solaris had to offer. All it had was a huge hype machine that went viral because of Stallman and his Church, the mom-and-dad-sponsored no-job students, and the IBM-sponsored RP stealth-injected press stories about how cool it was (and, uh, RedHat stock in Nasdaq - a testimony not to quality but to the strength of the American stock market), which was strategic in killing Sun Microsystems...When in fact, Linux was poorly built, poorly designed, and ever since its inception date a veritable Swiss cheese full of security holes....(Major breaches in GNU and Debian, and kernel trojans just about every single month...There's no denying that shitty track record)
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Thank you! The Windows appologists sometimes resort to ridculous claims (Window HP(?) is free to OEMs).
I just purchased a laptop from Fujitsu without an OS and it was exactly 50 euros cheaper than the same model with Windows 7. So, the Microsoft "Tax" is 50 Euros. Actually, I think you actually get a lot of software for that money, but, the laptop works beautifully with Ubuntu 10.04LT and is much crisper, boots quickly, and, of course, is less virus prone.
It IS free as the cost of Win 7 HP has been published several times, it is $15 a copy.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/newegg-reveals-windows-7-oem-prices.ars
"Earlier this month, we learned OEMs pay Microsoft about $50 for each copy of Windows."
Or, if you will:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-oems-pay-about-50-for-each-copy-of-windows.ars
Do you REALLY want me to provide citations?
I'd love to see some citations of Windows 7 Start costing $8 and HP costing $15.
interesting
I went to Linux World in San Jose in 1999. All the distros were there giving away their CDs for free. Some BSD flavor had a booth (which doesn't make a lot of sense at Linux World to begin with) and they wanted $50 for their CDs. That was enough for me.
Na, that's too much work just for bullshitting on Slashdot. Really I was just trying to prompt more of the details out of someone who could provide some plausible why as to this surprising fact. (Which did work out this time)
At this moment, I cannot install fedora core 16 without it wiping my entire disk, because 'it does not recognize my partitions'. It wants to live on one big partition of type 'GPT' (Guid based partitioning), and damn everyone else !
Bullshit! I run Fedora 16 and with a considerable amount of applications installed (2097 packages to date) and I am using no more than 8GB.
With Fedora I normally set up a boot partition for "boot" and another partition for a logical volume group then add appropriate volumes such as "root", "usr" (you can combine the two if you want - say 12GB max) and some other volumes such as tmp (2GB), swap (2GB+) and var (2GB) or if you really want you can combine the lot and even put swap into a file if you want. Good grief even a 10 year old (although one that could read a HOWTO) could do this.
Even on my machine I don't allocate more than 20GB to Fedora 16 although what you allocate to your users, archive and other sundries is up to you and yes I only run Fedora on my machine and anything else I need as in MS Windows, Solaris, and other x86 *nix I run in a virtual machine.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
FC16 is not Linux, you mewling ninny.
You are right FC16 does not exist it is actually called Fedora 16 although it does have a 3.1.1-2 Linux Kernel :)
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Back in 90-smth I used to be a Debian user. I used to ask a lot on Usenet and lists. That's because the system was so bad, and the documentation so shitty (Linux users back them used to use the "LDP" - Linux Documentation Project - which in effect was a bunch of badly written and outdated documents.
Then some dude from a Debian LUG (I helped begin, BTW) talked greatly about the virtues of FreeBSD. I never looked back. Right he was, indeed. Soo much better than Debian. I actually felt a sort of relief. You don't know your in the shit when you're always in the shit...And then, Mac OS X came out (borrowing stuf from FreeBSD, of course), and they set the bar higher for "Unix".
The reason you don't hear much about FreeBSD from users in forums is because the documentation is good and the system so solid and easy to understand design-wise, that you never hear that incessant bruhaha you get in Linux distros, where everything is always breaking from one upgrade to another (or the never-ending infighting that goes on). If you head out to a BSD forum without having read the thorough documentation (a trait all BSD distros share), then it turns out you are one lazy moron. There's no excuse, like there is in Linux distros, where typically the manual page was last written in 1998.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
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I am not a lung, even though I have a lung inside of me, and it in vital to my survival.
Logic, man, logic. Employ it!!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
And Jail, MAC, Dtrace port and Capsicum.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Unless you're using the old BSD license (with the advertising clause), BSD is compatible with GPL. And as far as I know, pretty much everyone moved away from that.
Well let us say, just for the sake of argument (and remember these were provided by OEMs trying to get lower prices and refuse upgrades of 7 from XP on netbooks, not to mention I can get pro and will be getting 2 copies for Xmas at $39 student discount and I kinda doubt students buying a single copy get a better deal than someone buying 100,000 copies, don't you?) that you data is correct. Now that is talking about Home Premium for $50, which would make starter at around $25. Now considering on last count the average netbooks has nearly FOURTY pieces of trialware installed (just look how many programs are listed under DeCrappifier if you wish for a citation since the OEMs refuse to publish numbers) you are looking at MOST windows costing $15-$30 after the trialware payback is figured in.
Now lets look at just ONE OEM has to pay for Ubuntu. they have to run their own servers, not cheap, they have to hire a team of developers to roll their own version of Ubuntu, what do a developer with experience in rolling their own distros and writing drivers go for? $100,000 a piece? probably need a dozen to run a distro at minimum, and then you have the returns which of course can't be sold as new and as HP admitted when they were looking to sell at an average of $8 profit per unit it really doesn't take but a handful of returns to equal a giant loss. And when we are talking 400% return rates it isn't hard to figure out which OS isn't worth the effort.
This is why ASUS, the ones who created the whole Linux netbook idea, quit carrying Linux, why Windows slaughtered Linux on netbooks where if Windows pricing made a difference anywhere THAT would be the market, yet the ALL abandoned Linux completely.
It is just simple common sense. Ask yourself just ONE single question...If Linux is so great and could save OEMs money then why aren't ANY of them using it? dell hides a handful of Ubuntu machines in the back, basically to get one more checkbox on their bulletpoint list, and the rest don't do even that, why? do you HONESTLY think it is some fast conspiracy to keep your miracle free OS away from the masses? Why isn't any of the little shops like mine using it to undercut competitors?
Because the sad and nasty truth that NO amount of mod points can EVER erase, nor can that one FOSSie going around claiming everyone that doesn't kiss Linus' booty MUST be APK ever change, is this simple truth, which is Linux is free only if your time is worthless and for the OEM frankly MSFT could double their prices and they STILL won't take your OS, because in the end it would cost MORE money. more money to fix broken drivers, more money to deal with the complaints, more money to run their own repos because the default one breaks more than it fixes.
here is a nice article I found several years ago and I hope that you read it. it is a perfect explanation, better than i could EVER write, of why Linux isn't going anywhere. But instead of addressing the problems outlined the "community" will just fling insults like monkeys flinging poo and proclaim their superiority. well I suppose being the biggest failure is still being the biggest at SOMETHING, not sure if I'd brag about it though.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Precisely! Linux is based on one of the previous versions of Minix - dunno which, but the current debate of monolithic vs microkernels played out as Linux vs Minix is more precisely a Minix 1.x or 2.x vs Minix 3.x. One could even think of Linux as the GPL version of Minix 1.x and Hurd as the GPL version of Minix 3 (except that their microkernel ain't worth beans and they'd do well to just fork Minix 3 and make it a GPL based microkernel basis for Hurd)
Incidentally, does anyone know whether Amoeba - the distributed OS that he wrote - whether that is a microkernel as well? I had no idea Google was replacing GNU w/ BSD userland tools in Android. Incidentally, I thought that Minix3 was just the microkernel, so that begs the question - does it come w/ its own userland, or can one put any userland on top of it that communicates w/ the kernel? Also, what about drivers - does Minix have drivers for as many devices as Linux or BSD does? And these would have to be re-written, since Minix cannot simply re-use BSD or Linux drivers since they are not a part of the kernel in the Minix case.
I do think it's a bit of a pity, since a great OS might be a Minix 3 microkernel, the Hurd daemons & drivers on top of it, and riding on top of that, GNUSTEP. That would be a great development platform, as well as OS.
So, logically, you weigh in on this issue the same as a DUCK (Democracy, Unfetterdness, Collaboration, Komputing), you're a DUCK and therefor, a commie! Burn her!
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Sour grapes from Tanenbaum. Who wants to hear his sob story about how he didn't get anywhere near as successful as Linus Torvalds ? Answer: Nobody Stuff happens and people make bad judgements all the time. Tsnnenbaum is just a disgruntled old fool.
1. Linux has a *full* "generic" 802.11 stack.
This is apparently almost true today. When I last looked, about four years ago, there were three almost completely independent 802.11 stacks and the one you used depended on the driver you used.
2. Licensing issues will most likely prevent you from copying "BSD" parts into Linux, unless the original author allowed for dual GPL / BSD licensing (and I doubt it)
Absolutely untrue. Lots of code in Linux is BSD or MIT licensed, some is even public domain. Only the aggregate work is GPL'd. Dual licensing GPL/BSDL is a completely pointless thing to do, legally speaking, because there is no legal impediment to incorporating BSDL code into a GPL project.
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Nothing more, nothing less.
That's why they went ONLY threading, because Windows threading was much lighter than their process forking whilst most UNIXs had almost no difference between them (except forking was safer).
It's why when you look for examples on how to do things in Java on Sun's site you'll see how it's done on Sun (obviously) and how it's done on Windows.
It's why fixing problems on Windows is done quickly whereas any request for a change to help the UNIXes is thrown to the kerb.
Java was invented to kill Microsoft.
Multiplatorm != 2 platforms.
At least I can put Linux to work as a desktop, server, embedded, or anything I want.
I'm sure that trying to do any of that with MINIX it will be impossible, apart from being slow as fuck due to its micro-kernel nature.
in 92, you couldn't do much with linux. your argument is that of a tinkerer. lawsuits stopped big companies like kmart and every damn bank from using it. notice there were no lawsuits for linux when the corporate drones picked it up.
it had absolutely everything to do with lawsuits. freebsd was/is way more stable. however linux has won the battle.
Support in writing drivers? That's an understatement for Linux. We make hardware. I can testify that all you need is to throw some nice hardware with good documentation to the community, and they'll write the drivers for you. For free.
I don't know what Win 7 HP is, but $15 will buy my family a meal, so if $15 is so meaningless to you that you consider it "free" then please send me $15 as soon as possible.
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The comparison to anarchy was not meant to be derogatory, but accurate. Both anarchy and BSD license would state that "freedom" means "no restrictions" whereas governmental systems and GPL would both say that it is necessary to curtail some freedoms in order to be guarenteed others.
I like both licenses, incidentally, but depending on your goals, GPL might be more practical. Anarchy, communism, democracy, etc are also only rough parallels when used in comparison to software licenses and methods-- whereas the "communism model" of OSS is actually workable because people can have real jobs, and BSD license is workable in ways that anarchy is not (because the BSD license exists inside of a system with laws), the actual political models do not work.
This stands out in the interview:
That suggests to me that Tanenbaum doesn't actually know what Linux is. Linux is just a kernel. Userland packages and how well (or not) they may be written have nothing to do with Linux. How many of the 8000 NetBSD packages are also available in Debian, for example? I would wager the vast majority, and they change "all the time" as much as they do when being run on Linux (the packages that aren't shared is probably the BSD equivalent of the base tools, like ls, grep, cp et al. I don't think the base userland GNU tools that run on Linux change all that often either).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Have you completely misinterpreted what I was saying, or are you suggesting that my choice had everything to do with lawsuits in spite of the fact that I clearly stated what the reasons for my choices were?
I took a good hard look at the requirements for 386bsd 0.0 when it first came out in '92, having already been experimenting with Linux for a few months already. The only factor that kept me from experimenting with 386BSD at that point as well was the fact that it required its own physical drive, and could not be installed on a separate partition of a drive that had been set up by the fdisk utility that came with DOS. If it had, I probably would have ended up utilizing it, because I could plainly see just from the descriptions that it had far more functionality.
I may have been only a "tinkerer", as you put it, but the factors that guided my choices were ultimately about interoperability with the hardware/software configuration that I actually had at the time, not lawsuits.
Besides... there weren't even any lawsuits at that point yet to *have* influenced my decision.
And I know I wasn't the only one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The man is clearly grumpy about all of the success of Linux had, and he surely knew that was giving an interview to a Linux supporting website, which leads me to believe that this was a flame war that he was clearly looking for, in any case, the Slashdot community picked it up (maybe just like he predicted) and people are talking about Minix again, which is good for him ! Nevertheless, he does make a point in micro kernels being more stable and reliable, an important buzzword in the embedded community, specially if you're into the safety-critical development tree like me. I'm now more tempted than ever to evaluate Minix as low cost alternative to the Green Hills, QNX and Wind River options. This interview was probably god send for him. !
The *BSD community has been painted as being "elitist" for well over 20 years now. But that's just not the case. It's a merely a community that's built around a meritocracy. They don't care who you are, or where you're from, or what your experience is, just as long as you have skill.
I got in an argument with Theo the Rat about the performance hit of Position Independent Executables on x86. Spoiler: It's 1%, however you get a 5% boost by -fomit-stack-pointer--which doesn't work with -fPIE -fPIC, so you take a 6% hit. Most processes spend less than 0.1% in the main executable process, and so the 6% hit becomes 0.006%. The exception is X11 itself, which at the time spent a whopping 8% of its time in the main executable, making the 6% hit a 0.48% hit.
When I posted the opening argument on the OpenBSD list--Position Independent Executables give you the ability to randomly assign the base address of the executable itself, allowing increased address space layout randomization--Theo immediately started talking to me off-list. He viciously argued that this stuff was "Very Expensive" while I told him to try a complete system profile. After as little as two round trips, he started cornerstoning on the argument: "I don't even know who you are. We invented this stuff. We've been doing this for forever."
In other words, because he's Theo, and because he runs OpenBSD, I'm wrong and he's automatically right.
He also once actually gave me a rather strong-stanced argument that using any static analyzer tool to try to expose bugs "creates more security holes." Like, the whole thing Coverity occasionally runs against Linux? Don't you dare point that at OpenBSD, it'll create security holes.
I've always assumed OpenBSD was run by idiots with their heads stuck up their asses since.
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here is a nice article I found several years ago and I hope that you read it. it is a perfect explanation, better than i could EVER write, of why Linux isn't going anywhere. But instead of addressing the problems outlined the "community" will just fling insults like monkeys flinging poo and proclaim their superiority. well I suppose being the biggest failure is still being the biggest at SOMETHING, not sure if I'd brag about it though.
Reading that list, I particularly agreed with #3.1 of their software support
3.Problems stemming from the vast number of Linux distributions: 1.No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
I've had precisely this problem. I had learned RHEL's way of configuring networking, which was to edit /etc/resolve.conf, use an utility called system-config-netwok to set up the IP addresses, then edit /etc/sysctl (I'm forgetting the exact filename) and then do a service network restart. I recently tried a GNUSTEP distro, and problem there was that none of the above files or commands were recognized. So getting connected was out of the question.
All distros ought to during installation prompt one for one's network settings, so that it can be configured right out of the box. During that installation, it would be helpful to say which files one needs to tinker with for that particular distro, since they are by no means standard
Ain't the M$ tax actually the royalties that they get w/ each copy of Android sold? M$ being bundled with Windoze is a clean sale, but in the case of Android, M$ did squat in getting Android to the market, yet they get paid $$$ for every copy that sells. That is what one would call a tax!!!
That's precisely the argument Hairyfeet was making - that the Linux 'community' is not interested in doing what's needed for Linux to be a success in the consumer market, which is not just phones & tablets, but PCs as well. Apple's success in the consumer segment has nothing to do with its being Unix - it's just incidental to them making NEXTSTEP, which had Mach 2.5/BSD underpinnings, as the basis of their OS.
A lot of the issues that were listed in the Russian site that Hairyfeet linked to might be avoidable in BSD, since it's pretty consistent across versions. Since Minix 3 is just the first such version, how Tannenbaum polices it so that it doesn't end up with the incompatibilities Linux has with itself would be interesting to watch.
That project has tried out a whole bunch of microkernels, excepting Minix 3. Don't see any reason why they couldn't fork Minix 3, port Hurd onto it, and on top of that, put Etoille/GNUSTEP. Maybe the Debian or Arch people could try it.
Good that he's developing an ARM version - he should do it on a Raspberry Pi. At the end of it, it would be interesting to see what it could do. A better idea than as OS for third world PCs
Excuse please, but you are making statements that do not reflect my reality. My house had mac and windows machines running and used by everyone in the house (me, wife and 3 kids) and I built a linux box and bashed my way into the linux world because it looked like a clearly better approach to everything. Not easier (at the time : fedora core 4) but better. I buy the freedom part, and the honesty part and the truthy part. I rejected the closed garden and the FUD and the monopoly stuff.
Now, one daughter has WinVista and hates it, but is too lazy to solve it the easy way. One daughter is running Kubuntu on her graphic design workstation (not entirely happy with kubuntu but as happy or happier than she is with her iBook pro, which is her status symbol. My wife is the most vociferous Linux user in the family, she also has an Android phone that she has figured how to jailbreak and use in China and the US with two SIM cards herself. She loves Linux and has all the choice in the world. My son doesn't even pay attention to any of it except when he is stymied by stupid interface differences that he has to figure out (but then he is 8 years old).
I'm a fedora fanboi, and proud of it, but still keep my family running Ubuntu LTS varieties to make my life easier. So, this idea of the P that Linux is one thing and was never consumer worthy is a crock, maybe it would be better to say that it is more recently on the scene as a consumer product? And my family downloads the lolcats and the puppies and all the stupid stuff that they shouldn't, but they quickly learn the package manager which solves 99% of the windows problems: stupid downloaded programs that trash the system. So, I think, and my experience is, that you are mistaken. case closed.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Not to be a simple "me too" but... "me too". The freebsd documentation is excellent (vs GNU "we don't like man, we prefer info" - which is shit). Linux has API changes every foo weeks which breaks stuff. FreeBSD might be a little slower out of the gate, but once something is implemented, its generally done properly and the documentation from 5 years ago is pretty much usable today.
I started out with Linux in 1995. Was exposed to solaris in 1998 and tried out BSD in 2001. Haven't looked back. Linux is just too "different" to everything else and generally not for any real good reason. If you're a linux user trying BSD (who has never been exposed to other unix), it works quite differently and will screw with your head for a bit. However it is more "the unix way" and makes more sense once you understand it. And as above, the handbook/docs are excellent.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Or sound. Does linux actually have reliable multichannel working without whatever bullshit flavour of the month daemon running yet? FreeBSD had fairly seamless multichannel audio back in the early 2000s if not previous.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
it's easy, except for the OS software licenses...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I built it on a generic *nix, and the only thing I had to change when I wanted it to work on OSX was the binaries that make the mp3s.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How the the cost of Windows for OEM's being offset by the money they make from packaging in trialware make Windows free? If a company decides not to load their computer up with crapware, then they will pass on the $15 cost of Windows to the customer. Saying Windows is "free as in beer" to OEMs is misleading, it costs $15 but that cost is offset by the revenue of the trialware. I would much rather pay an extra $15 than have to go through all of the trouble of uninstalling all of the shit that comes packed on a new computer, so I think it would be safe to say that OEM version of Windows are only free if you don't value your time.
You need a better article, the narod.ru one if basically full of non-issues except for a few.
All of the hardware support ones are pretty much non-issues these days.
inability to run familiar Windows software
People should not see programs as ends in themselves, they should see their tasks as problems and programs as tools in which to complete them, if you can't run 3d studio blender will do your 3d models/animation just fine and dandy.
>No games. Full stop.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say _very few_ games? saying that not a single game exists for linux is just a little bit idiotic.
No native solutions for really simple file sharing in the local network.
If my grandmother can click an icon labelled 'file sharing' and set up an nfs share with two clicks, without any instruction, I'd bet most other people can too.
Steep learning curve
Again with the grandmother example, it took her all of a minute to figure out the fox icon was internet, and then she was fine.... if this is considered 'steep' you have far larger issues. Should be noted someone gave her a windows laptop afterwards, and she finds windows utterly unusable because she is now used to linux as it's what she started on.
His TL;DR version is most telling.
No games, no familiar software, no MS Office, no Active Directory or its equivalent.
this tells me "OMG, it isn't an exact replica of windows, wahhhh!"
Linux is unstable and prone to regressions when things which used to work break inexplicably.
Regressions do happen, but are you honestly going to tell me that there is not a single windows driver out there that is frequently updated that has not?
Too many Linux'es with incompatible configuration systems and different software packaging.
Again, "I have too much choice, wahhh!"
Linking to articles is useless when said articles are full of shite.
A better obstacle for linux's adoption is peoples dislike of change (people like to stick to what they know). But really, why should any linux users actually care about that? we already use it. Obsessing about what other people would like is useless to whatever we are up to.
That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently.
When overall performance of freebsd is lower, who gives a damn?
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
It depends on which kernel you know best. If you're a Linux developer than writing one for Linux will be easier. If you're a FreeBSD developer then writing one for FreeBSD will be easier. It is not hard to write one for FreeBSD. It's a very clean architecture with plenty of readily accessible docs.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!