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Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Linux turns 25 this year(!!). To mark the event, IEEE Spectrum has a piece on the history of Linux and why it succeeded where others failed. In an accompanying question and answer with Linus Torvalds, Torvalds explains the combination of youthful chutzpah, openness to other's ideas, and a willingness to unwind technical decisions that he thinks were critical to the OS's development: "I credit the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. [...] The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. [...] I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
I just turned 26, I wish I was as successful as Linux...
I want to see how he will undo the systemd shit.
> As long as Linux decisions are made quickly rather than thoughtfully, Linux won't have a chance against Microsoft
You mean Apple?
Linux already set expectations higher than MS has been able to meet.
Personally I thought most involved in the open source software community had an understanding of this concept, am I wrong.?
I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
If you believe this to be the case, how do you account for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD?
> Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
Did you miss Vista? How about Windows RT?
Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Clear and through decisions my ass.
Linux kernel development needs people who are capable, period.
And you seem to forget who Linus is married to.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Let's talk about kernels.
The number of Linux kernel currently running on mobile dwarfs XNU. Windows 7 dominates Desktop. Apple does better on Desktop than Linux, but this is becoming less relevant.
Linux also dominates the cloud.
And tomorrow, I have to format and re-install Win 7 on a customer's computer because reverting to Win 7 from Win 10 (which he didn't consent to) left it unusable. 4 hours of "startup repair", BCDEDIT, etc, etc and it still won't boot.
I will not recommend Win 10 to anyone under any circumstances. MS has really dropped the ball this time.
I can't really recommend Mint, either. Debian + {Windows look-alike shell} seems to be pretty stable so far.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
for all that he is famous for flaming people, he also allows others to be wrong
He is trying to be sarcastic. There are attention seeking anti-sjw's whining on like this in every discussion now.
I'll admit he is showing signs of developing alzheimer's, (No matter how much I explain, he still thinks "Foxfire" is his operating system) but windows update automatically downloading windows 10 in the background has been repeatedly posted on / and seems to be a pretty common issue:
http://www.cio.com/article/304...
http://winsupersite.com/window...
http://www.howtogeek.com/22855...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
Females can't code.
It's so damned hard to tell these days--especially with Americans, who seem increasingly prone to take any criticism of their work as a personal attack.
(I'm originally from America, so yes, I'm allowed to say that.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> Apple does better on Desktop than Linux, but this is becoming less relevant.
If you say so?
Nothing is more despicable than people who attempt to shoehorn less qualified people in. If someone, let it be a minority or whatever, then let them succeed on merit alone, not this crap you're peddling about how STEM needs more women. It doesn't, by the way.
So please take your atrocious and neo-fascist bullshit back to whatever SJW pit it came from, where feelings are more important than anything else. And nothing is quite so insulting to women as your bullshit that the only way they're going to do well in STEM is if we give them golden tickets. They can do it on their own, through their own merit.
Lesser men have grown richer than he with that attitude.
Thus we see you don't have to be a genius to succeed. Sometimes you can go a long way if you happen to have something that resembles what many people think they want. No, linux isn't great. But in a number of respects it's much better than *cough* certain other software *cough* with a much bigger market penetration.
Doesn't change that the state of OSes, even the state of software in general, is pretty rotten. As evidenced in so many ways, big and little, including an entire industry for nekkid "computer security" emperor clothes. In some sense, Linus is an enabler helping to improve the state of computing, though equally arguably he could have done better, and perhaps he still can. "Market success", by the by, is not a reliable indicator for sufficient quality, especially not when the feedback mechanisms are wildly misunderstood by most of the market participants.
The only people attention-seeking are SJWs who think the Universe really does spin around them and their feelings. Because god forbid someone gets offended. Clearly we have to censor them so other people can cope with their emotions. Or else gosh darn it we're causing other people irreparable mental harm!
If the response to that has been especially vitriolic and aggressive it's only because they've been equally aggressive in pushing their agenda, and succeeding. It's even infected the military.
Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time. GNU was almost finished except for a kernel, and Linus wrote a kernel.
That's all folks.
Obviously you haven't been hit with Microsoft's nagging popups to upgrade to windows 10. That's called malware in my book, malware that can't be easily disabled. Yeah, fuck you and fuck Microsoft.
This time? Man the ball is on the ground most of the time at Microsoft
"unwilling to admit when he's wrong" ... sums it up in a nutshell. I've seen way too many times where he's just plain wrong and/or ignorant but backs his opinions regardless.
Linux is a success despite Linus.
He's managed lead one of the most elaborate software development projects ever undertaken for fifteen years, taking it from a tinker-toy up to one of the most successful of all operating systems. That's pretty impressive. Managers may not produce anything directly of value themselves, but that doesn't mean they are not important for the success of a project.
It is what leading people and/or companies is all about. Make fast decisions, then if wrong fix the consequences and learn from your errors. That is the learn from your errors that most entrepreneurs do not get.
And there should be another mandatory one for all these inflated ego types: most good decisions are not about being smart but being fast and lucky. I guess that Linus was at the right place at the right time too, that he is not a GNU or BSD zealot probably helped a lot too.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Is that you again, Kay?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
So politics and Hollywood do not exist?
What does period has to do with anything?
BSD has a mindset of "let's design it" instead of "grow it". So probably that kind of overthinking isn't working out so well for them.
It was a success because people far more talented than he was were willing to support an idea
How he earned this support? By luck?
a fucking tool for acting like a CEO
What the... with this statement. This man may (of course) not invent everything, he is of course not the most talented, but he definitely know stuffs he put in the kernel, and know how to do this very good (many of Slashdot users seem to agree that such "ruthless" Linus to be, is the reason why Linux is successful). If he such a tool, unlike a company, some other "more talented" people just fork the kernel and many other talents will follow the new ones.
and attempting to take all the credit for the millions of man-hours of work donated by other people.
You could track who has contributed to Linux kernel. How Linus "attempts to take all credits".
Unlike CEOs, who "invented" X, "designed" Y, and no one knows who the fuck actually done for them.
How many people were involved in the development of the first Linux kernel?
Of that person, how many are still actively developing it?
I see what you did there, timothy. I bet you don't.
At the bottom of the
So politics and Hollywood do not exist?
No, they're all SJWs, including Trump.
PS: SJW means "anyone I don't like and for the record, I'm also a fuckwit"
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Nope. He has successfully *developed* a massive project, and done so in a shoestring budget. And has done so *because* he has no clueless managers around trying to impress the Big Boss. Certainly, managers not only rarely produce anything of value, they often are a neat deterrent for projects.
The reason for the relative manager abundance is that The Man prefers to listen to nice people making promises, rather to listening to engineers explaining why their pet idea is stupid and doomed.
Licencing. The GPL made Linux an attractive platform, especially for people working on the critically important GNU software it needed to be useful. It also set the tone for distros like Debian to emerge, and for commercial outfits like Redhat and Canonical to operate in a way that kept the open source community happy and cooperative.
A lot of Linux is written by people being paid to write it. If the licence had been BSD then much of that code might never have seen the light of day, only ever being shipped as proprietary binaries. Linux development would be much further behind without the GPL.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Capable != willing to put up with bad attitudes and being shouted at.
I've left jobs because the people there were asshats. Why would I waste my time trying to submit patches in that kind of environment? When I have done patches I've either just published them or passed them on to someone else to pitch on the LKML, because I've got better stuff to do. If someone has a criticism they can make it, but if they can't be reasonably civil about it then fuck 'em, it's their loss. I can fork or just apply the patch locally.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The secret to old age is whatever old people have been doing that isn't normal. ("What old people have been doing," because well, obviously. "That isn't normal," because other people do normal stuff, so that can't be it.) It's called survivorship bias. Successful people just don't want to admit how much of their success is owed to sheer luck, and neither do the people who look up to them. Kills the motivation.
Did you know Ada ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One has to differentiate between opinions and facts.
Having two contradicting opinions does not neccesary mean one is right and the other is wrong.
Despite the hurt feelings that may occur sometimes, I think it is a good thing that Torvalds has the final say on such decisions.
This guarantees a somewhat homogenous design philosophy for the kernel.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Sure, it's all down to the license. If you ignore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.
BSD was at the time a legal uncertainty due to legal action. While some undoubtably prefer the GPL, it's disenguous to describe the success of Linux and fail to mention the legal issues with BSD that caused many to shift to Linux. It wasn't that the GPL was so great. The big incentive was to have a UNIX-like that wasn't at immediate risk of being shut down by legal cases.
And you do know that plenty of BSD licensed code is out there and doing just fine? I like the GPL licenses for what they aim to achieve. However I don't treat them like religious truths.
Capable != willing to put up with bad attitudes and being shouted at.
Indeed. This is why Sarah Sharp and Matthew Garrett left: unwillingness to put up with bullshit. Both contributed a whole bunch of really good stuff to the kernel and are thankfully still gainfully employed in the greater Linux community, just not with the kernel itself.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Time will prove this out.
The auto update settings reset every now and then due to various updates.
It happened to my friend as well.
Windows really turned their update system to shit when they made it so that if you turn on auto updates it completely fucks you over by restarting whenever it wants.
For instance, on my PC I tell windows to restart at 4 AM.
Of course, at around 12 it will go hibernate, so the next morning I get up and turn it on and it wants to reboot.
But I don't want it to reboot, I want to do some fucking work.
Get your shit together MS.
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.); contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing; etc. And dare I mention the nightmare of dealing with an initrd, which is more of a side-effect of some of the above?
Not that other systems have done perfectly well without going through all these continual changes and contortions.
"You cannot have improvement without change, but you sure as heck can have change without improvement!" https://slashdot.org/comments....
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There are also some other factors at play like: GPL vs BSD license, managed by nerdz like us vs some ivory tower in Berkeley, charisma of the leader, etc.
Woo! Quarter-century of the Linux Desktop!!!
Did I get that right?
Ignoring the moronic insult at the beginning, you are both right.
BSD is more free, but what it doesn't require is that changes made be contributed back. GPL says if you make changes and ship them to anyone you have to make the source code available.
So GPL forces people to play nice or to not play at all.
Willing To Be Wrong
It goes without saying, but it's ok to be willing to be wrong provided you have some skills and a clue of the issues you need to deal with. Otherwise, you are just a morbidly fat walrus flapping on dry land.
Yeah, but if you look at the moderation on my comment, apparently they were just trolls who were trolling Linus by withdrawing their free labour or something.
Moderation on Slashdot is broken.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Incorrect. Code licensed under BSD does not have to be released. That's why it's used by companies like Sony (PS3/PS4), Panasonic (TVs) and Apple (MacOS) and Linux is not.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Did you go to special school in order to say things that stupid?
Do you think leading with things like the above is a good way to garner support for your standpoint?
BSD is much more free than GPL
That's a matter of definition and never-ending debate. In short, it depends on what you define "free" to be. You are neither right, nor wrong, simply stating your subjective opinion. Rest assured, it'll not be taken as fact, since it isn't.
but both of them flat out guarantee that code released under them stays free forever.
More or less, yes.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
Lemon curry???
Licencing.
I agree that Linux' success is mostly about licensing, and I think the GPL did play a positive role, but I don't think it's as big as you say. At the time when Linux emerged and started building up steam, BSD existed but wasn't a viable alternative because it wasn't clear who owned it or how it could be legally used. Linux had an overwhelming advantage because its licensing situation was clear.
BSD was eventually freed by the courts in 1994, but by then Linux had already grown an ecosystem of distributions, with lots of great new ideas about how to package, deliver and support software. Some of those ideas were a direct outgrowth of the GPL philosophy, and the GPL on the kernel and the GNU tools helped to set the expectation that virtually everything should be open, so I don't want to understate the GPL's contribution, but I think that BSD could have been in roughly the place that Linux is, if it had actually been available for use and distribution three years earlier. I think we're better off with Linux and the GPL than we would have been with BSD and its license, but BSD could have worked almost as well.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
You are quite wrong.
http://time.com/3856066/aol-ve...
2.1 million people in America using dialup as of last May.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Clear and through decisions my ass.
Heh. OTOH, my father in law used a Debian box for years (I set it up for him, after maintaining Windows for him proved to be a Sisyphean task), and I had a similar nightmare trying to keep it updated. I wrote a script that dialed in every night at 1 AM and downloaded for six hours, then disconnected. That clearly didn't work because every now and then a package update came down that was bigger than what could be downloaded in six hours, and completely choked the process. So then I set up a complicated system that got a list of packages needed from the box at his house, sent it to a server I had, which downloaded the packages there, then his box rsynced them. That worked better because if a download didn't complete one night, rsync would resume it the next. That system worked for a while, though the box might go for a few weeks downloading before it had a complete set of updates and could apply them. But eventually the volume of updates grew to the point that it basically never caught up. So, every now and then I downloaded the outstanding packages to a USB stick and took them up to his house.
When I got tired of that, I convinced my wife and her siblings that we should all go in together and buy him a year of broadband (a 5mbit WiMax service). Predictably, when the pre-paid year was up he happily took over paying for the broadband service himself. It cost 3X as much as his dialup had, but was dramatically more useful.
There's a fundamental problem here, and it's not the decision by Windows 10 to download updates automatically. The problem is that modern systems are too big to keep patched over dialup, and, frankly, the Internet is no longer very useful over dialup. Now, I'd hope that Windows 10 offers you an alternative way to deliver updates to it, but the real solution is to get something better than dialup. To be clear, not updating is *not* a viable alternative.
What is this userland configuration tool of which you write? Everyone knows that you should put the network configuration information in 3 different include files, and recompile the kernel (from 5 1/4" floppy) when it changes.
I've noticed the bounce too. Sitting at -1 for both posts now, but in a while meta-moderation will probably push at least one back up to +2 or +3. Kinda screws with the debate though, since 80% of the comments are in the first hour or two.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users.
That's patently false.
I have been using Linux since the earliest versions, and have only ever casually installed *BSD just to see what was there, and I absolutely loathe systemd. All of the distros and distro-forks that have appeared at without-systemd are maintained and used by ... wait for it ... Linux developers and Linux users. Not a single one is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Trying to turn this into a BSD vs Linux thing is just pathetic.
Considering he's never been wiling to admit when he's wrong.
You know, people keep dragging up that old lawsuit. I'm not so sure I buy into that, it smells way too much like a convenient excuse for the BSD people for effectively not getting anywhere, despite having a huge headstart on Linux. If I'd venture I guess, I'd say the different mentality where things are developed have a whole lot more to do with it.
The "intelligently designed" philosophy of the BSDs where a need is noticed by the Gods, who then sit down, design, test, implement and then eventually delivers to the users, makes for a way too slow rate of development compared to the organic growth of Linux where basically anyone with the adequate skills and a problem to solve is welcome. Combine that with the tit for tat attitude in the GPL compared to the "thanks for the code, I'll take it from here - so long suckers!" attitude in the BSD license, which a lot of people feel is more appealing, and I don't really think a lawsuit something like 30 years ago is very relevant.
Yes of course. Because clearly they weren't little primadonnas who couldn't deal with not being the center of the universe.
15 years? More like 25.
Then you're an idiot.
Your logic is broken. All release BSD code is released. Any code that is not released is not BSD code, so no worries. BSD license only says that free code remains free.
The Victor Hugo quote about nothing being more powerful than an idea whose time has come is, to me, the story of Linux.
In the '90s we had the beginnings of the internet, so people could collaborate in ways they had never done before. We had commodity PC hardware that could do interesting OS things. More.
My first Linux system was a 486/66 with Slackware 96 back in 1997. It worked fine. I use Slackware to this day on my own computers. The standard at work is CentOS. So be it.
...laura
You know, that's a perfectly adequate explanation to why Linux got started, but it doesn't really explain why BSD never got anywhere, or why it's dwindling.
The facts are, lawsuit or not, BSD had years of head-start, and probably both more and better qualified people working on it to start with. And it got outclassed by a hobby project started and run by a student.
Just get him a phone ? Doesn't sound like he even needs a computer.
I use dial-up internet you insensitive clod!
No other economically viable solution is available to many in rural areas.
Linux is a kernel and pretty useless on its own. Think about that for a second. Think HARD about that for a second. Now go play in traffic.
I think the point being made here is that no separation is made between the kernel and Linux as a complete operating system. The kernel plays a role in the success of Linux, but it's not the sole reason for it's success. It's all the tools and software that make up the operating system which made it successful. Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
The s/w licensing. We take that for granted nowadays, but 15yrs ago it was a make or break for a lot of high profile projects.
Linus brought the right license and "kept at it", aka adoption. those 2 things make up 75% of why Linux exists today.
No. The GPL is more free, because Free software is really about the software's freedom.
When you get Free code, you have the Four Freedoms - to use, study, modify, and redistribute. If you modify that code, make an improved program, and let someone else use it, the next person must also have the Four Freedoms. And they only get that if they have access to the code. When you don't release the code, the next person does not get the Four Freedoms.
Circumcision is child abuse.
In any event, the original premise is that if BSD had been used, the code contributions could have been locked up in proprietary bundles, thus making sure that the advancements in BSD that were made by those companies are never contributed back to the project unless they wanted to. And they usually don't want to.
In Linux, if you make code changes to the kernel, they get released with source if you try and provide a solution that uses a modified Linux kernel.
Yes, BSD is free, and it will remain free. But only the BSD that is created by the BSD project team for BSD or voluntary contributions back. They're not forcing Apple, for instance, to release their alterations to BSD (if any) as free source code.
This is not to say BSD is bad, only that Linux under the GPL has a gimmick that forces more of the work done with it to end up as open source code contributions which can be more readily made use of by the general development world. This would tend to make it more popular among developers, and more developers means more potential for advancement on a project.
Linux was successful initially because people were REALLY REALLY sick of all the Un*x wars going on at the time. Here was a way out of that shitstorm.
To be fair, Microsoft's decisions are not always about the viability or capabilities of their actual software. They're mostly thinking on how to make a product that gets them a wedge into a market. For that, the software only has to be sufficient, not necessarily ground breaking. The lack of software capability is made up for by clever deals and marketing.
Of course, sometimes they miss the target of "sufficient" and the product fails. Other times, this works well for them.
And for a mediocre product, Microsoft's decisions have maintained Windows' dominance of the desktop market better than you might otherwise expect, and even given them a niche in the server market, where they are much more clearly outclassed by UNIX-likes.
Perhaps Linus is willing to be wrong, but he's unwilling to admit when he's wrong.
Sometimes people focus on Linus' insults, but lost in all that is how often he insults himself. Even in the article, he mentions times when he was wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Did you go to special school in order to say things that stupid?
This is AmiMojo we're talking about; he's the headmaster of said school.
Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
A car engine is far more useful than a car, and designing a building block which underpins not only desktop operating systems, but servers, 80% of the world's smartphones, and embedded devices a plenty is a far greater achievement for what Torvald's is being poo-pooed for.
"I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
Torvalds for Senate!
Correct. I went to all the trouble of looking up the year linux began and subtracting, and then typoed a digit.
Yea, 15 doesn't do credence.
First saw Linux, not sure what it precisely was..., in 1997. That was me just beginning into post C64, OS/2 computing... where the 1st PC I bought(laptop) as an adult was early 1998 with Windows 98 SE. Had a Win95 'beige box' just before that, but the gap was real from C64 to WIn95.
I couldn't even appreciate Linux in 1997.
Nope. If you have "recommended updates" it will automatically try to download in the background and then prompt for install.
So you're taking a stand on less than 1% of the population? If dialup isn't strictly extinct, it's an extremely endangered species.
Supporting dialup users simply isn't a major concern for a lot of companies anymore.
With about half of dialup users being poor (unable to afford broadband) or outright luddites (unwilling to change for any reason) according to that report, I can't really blame tech companies for ignoring them.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
apparently they were just trolls who were trolling Linus by withdrawing their free labour or something.
Not wanting to be sworn at and belittled makes one an SJW. We know SJWs are bad because and useless they represent everything evil in all its forms. Therefore not wanting to be sworn at makes them evil and useless. Since they're useless there's no point having them on the kernel team.
Moderation on Slashdot is broken.
Anything counter to running round like a headless chicken squawking "SJW SJW SJW" all over the place seems to get modbombed down pretty fast. You're back to +3 now though, so sanity is starting to prevail again. The modbombing crowd are pretty quick off the mark too, so posts tend to spike low before getting modded back up.
The two of you should get a room, because, really.... publicly ego-massaging and congratulating each other that you both think the "correct" thoughts? You both just responded to a post that was bombed down to -1 in no time, and try to say that *that* post is representative of slashdot?
BTW: Sanity *is* starting to prevail, which is why the ideological nonsense from both sides almost always goes down and stays down - right now AmiMoJo's comment is still modded down, not at +3. On the rare occasion either of you post something egalitarian, your post goes up and stays up. Hard as it may be for you to believe, to the middle majority of the bell curve, both sides look the same, whether the issue is Trump/Guns/Politics/Religion.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Which is why when the various *BSD started they were absolutely anal about documenting every commit. The (e.g.) FreeBSD SVN (formerly CVS) code repository goes back over two decades years to the 4.4BSD Lite tapes:
* https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/COPYRIGHT?view=log
Something that it took Linux over a decade to learn--and which caused the SCO-IBM lawsuits: no one could really traces all the code to the source. One of Linux developers (Linus?) once famously remarked that he "didn't believe in source control management".
So you're taking a stand on less than 1% of the population? If dialup isn't strictly extinct, it's an extremely endangered species.
I'm taking a stand on nothing. I was replying to a poster that said it was extinct. It's not. I pointed that out.
Supporting dialup users simply isn't a major concern for a lot of companies anymore.
Certainly not Windows 10 - where it is going to down;had and install updates no matter what you are on.
Most Linux distros as well - a good internet connection is a huge advantage during the install.
With about half of dialup users being poor (unable to afford broadband) or outright luddites (unwilling to change for any reason) according to that report, I can't really blame tech companies for ignoring them.
Frankly, I don't care a whole lot about dialup users anyhow. I was just pointing out an inaccuracy. It isn't extinct.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
BSD strives to exist, not to be popular. It also actively restricts participation, even to the point of refusing patches and re-implementing the same idea in a similar way. This reduces distractions, and helps maintain a static culture.
Linux has wide open participation, and prefers to accept existing (potentially imperfect) patches rather than re-invent a wheel. The culture is fairly open, and evolves over time.
They both have equal success, if you measure each based on achieving their own goals.
"Foxfire"
Try this: "It's called Firefox, like the Clint Eastwood movie."
Baby steps.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
Oh, and here we have the Windows equivalent of the stone-cold myopic Privileged Apple Asshole who lives in Mommies bedroom and because Mommie works hard and gives him the Good Stuff he can't fathom everyone else not having it as well. Since Mommie pays for his 10mbit internet he can't even conceive of anyone else not having it. That or he works for Apple, but is a closet Microsoftie.
If you can't understand why this has been written, then you are even further gone than is obvious.
So you're taking a stand on less than 1% of the population? If dialup isn't strictly extinct, it's an extremely endangered species.
Supporting dialup users simply isn't a major concern for a lot of companies anymore.
With about half of dialup users being poor (unable to afford broadband) or outright luddites (unwilling to change for any reason) according to that report, I can't really blame tech companies for ignoring them.
And another. I bet you are all "liberal an shit," and love Bernie. Yeah.
Oh, and here we have the Windows equivalent of the stone-cold myopic Privileged Apple Asshole who lives in Mommies bedroom and because Mommie works hard and gives him the Good Stuff he can't fathom everyone else not having it as well. Since Mommie pays for his 10mbit internet he can't even conceive of anyone else not having it.
When Mommie decides to move in yet another Uncle Harry and finally kick your lazy ass out and you have to go live at GranGran's house, who only has dial-up, we'll see who is crying little girl tears about "life not being fair Mommie!"
If you can't understand why this has been written, then you are even further gone than is obvious.
Willing to be wrong, after yelling at, screaming at, swearing at opposition until all but the most thick-skinned and persistent get the message through.
Peoples views on systemd are totally orthogonal to recognising that exploiting children for sexual pleasure is utterly reprehensible. If feminists are against child rape then I'm a feminist.
Now fuck off, and when you get there you can fuck off some more.
Grace Hopper begs to differ.
I had to disable Windows Update completely recently (Win7), because its service kept hogging one CPU core completely for days and held close to 1GB of memory...
Hard as it may be for you to believe, to the middle majority of the bell curve, both sides look the same, whether the issue is Trump/Guns/Politics/Religion.
Actually, to the middle majority, the two sides don't look the same.
The middle majority understand the concept that just because you see two people fighting, it doesn't mean they're both equally bad or at fault.
If you see a big young guy (yes, I'm bringing gender stereotypes in) appearing to try to snatch a purse from an old lady (yup, age stereotype too), and the old lady is struggling and fighting back, do you assume the old lady is equally bad as the dude?
Even on a show like Jerry Springer and you have some really messed up people on both sides, people can and will form an opinion on which side is less worse.
So there's totally a difference in moderation between the sides (a mod gap if you will ;p). Its existence however is not for the reason AmiMojo and co believes.
"Foxfire", like the Angelina Jolie movie.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You should read the book "Outliers" by Gladwell. In it he examines why Gates, Jobs, etc became so successful. Was it because they were smarter than the rest? No, it is all about timing. In a short window, the computer industry was shaping and if you had the right knowledge you could create a company that became a leader. He dissects several successful business men and shows that it is all about timing. The IT giants (Jobs, Gates, etc) all were born roughly in the same year. If you were born outside that window, chances are much much smaller that you succeed in creating a giant IT company. For instance, he talks about hockey players. All elite hockey players, are born in january, february or march. If you are born in january, instead of december, you had almost a year more of physical development. Which translates into you being drafted into hockey schools instead of the december boy. And your hockey teacher focuses more on january boy (because he is better) and gives him more training. So he is selected to play more matches, instead of sitting on the bench. Over the years, this accumulates and adds up. So after 10 years, he is maybe twice as good as the december boy. So ALL elite players are born in jan/feb/mar. If you are born in december, you are NEVER going to make it to the top as a hockey player. There is NO elite hockey player that are born in december. But he also talks about... basketball(?) players that gets drafted in june. And guess what, all the elite NHL players are born in... June, July or August. If you are born in May you are never going to make it to the top as a basket player. Just drop it and change career plans. The book is _extremely_ interesting and again and again he explains that timing is everything. There is a short window where you can succeed. If not, it will be much much more difficult. FreeBSD was sued in court so nobody would touch FreeBSD. So Linus T had a window of opportunity. If FreeBSD were not sued in court, it would surely has won because FreeBSD was technically superior than a Linux kernel made by a teenager who just learned to program. The code was _bad_. That is why Linus unwinds code in Linux, because he did not know the best way to do stuff. So he experimented and tried this and that. He had to learn the hard way what works or not. That is also why Linux has no stable kernel ABI, so it is a moving target which creates lot of threads on "I upgraded Linux and now my sound card / printer / etc does not work". All OSes except Linux, has stable kernel ABIs. If Linux device driver model was superior, all OSes would change their driver model.
Show us the punch cards.
No cards, no program. All you have is specs.