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The Re-Unification of Linux
In the wake of the wildly successful Red Hat IPO stories mooting the possibility that Linux might `fragment' under corporate pressure seem to be proliferating. The memory of the great proprietary-Unix debacle of the 1980s and early 1990s is constantly invoked -- N different versions diverging as vendors sought to differentiate their products, but succeeded only in balkanizing their market and inviting the Windows invasion.
But amidst all this viewing-with-alarm (some of it genuine, much of it doubtless seeded by Microsoft) something ironically fascinating is happening. Unix is beginning to re-unify itself.
SGI's recent decision to drop IRIX and focus on Linux is one telling straw in the wind. Another is SCO's launch of a Linux professional-services group, clearly a trial balloon aimed at discovering whether SCO's branded-Unix business can be migrated to a Linux codebase. I visited a Hewlett-Packard R&D lab last week, and learned that many people there expect HP to deep-six its HP-UX product in favor of Linux in the fairly near future.
What's causing this phenomenon? Open source, of course. Whoever you are -- SGI, SCO, HP, or even Microsoft -- most of the smart people on the planet work somewhere else. The leverage you get from being able to use all those brains and eyeballs in addition to your own is colossal. It's a competitive advantage traditional operating-systems vendors are finding they can no longer ignore.
Playing along now and trying to defect later won't work either -- because running away from the community with your own little closed Linux fragment would just mean you didn't get to use those brains any more. You'd be swiftly out-evolved and out-competed by the vendors still able to tap the literally hundreds of thousands of open-source developers out there.
What we have now have going is a virtuous circle -- as each of the old-line Unix outfits joins the Linux crowd, the gravity it exerts on the others grows stronger. The Monterey and Tru-64 development efforts, the last-gasp attempts to produce competitive closed Unixes, can't even muster convincing majorities of support inside the vendors backing them; both IBM and Compaq are investing heavily in Linux.
Linux fragmenting? No way. Instead, it's cheerfully absorbing its competition. And the fact that it is `absorbing' rather than `destroying' is key; vendors are belatedly figuring out that the value proposition in the OS business doesn't really depend on code secrecy at all, but instead hinges on smarts and service and features and responsiveness.
These are all things the worldwide community of open-source hackers are really good at supplying. Vendors become packaging and value-add operations that never have to re-invent the wheel again. Customers get better software.
By joining the Linux community, everybody wins.
--
Eric S. Raymond
That's all X's doing. In the future KDE and GNOME will most likely not play nice. Different object sharing mechanisms will break compatiblity. Metaphors will be different for both GUIs. Sure we technical people can use KDE and GNOME programs together.. but KDE/GNOME aren't for us. Always focus on the target audience. I really doubt a end-user who doesn't like computers and has no time to deal with them will understand why program_X looks different and won't work right with program_Y.
Keep in mind end-users can have trouble with any and everything. Don't give them too much credit (or too little). Just understand while one might understand two widget sets, another will run screaming.
Also KDE/GNOME aren't close to achieving their goals. Right now they aren't much more than a Xlib application with simple extensions like drag and drop.
Well, I'd rather not be part of a group of people that have an exclusionary and/or elitist attitude. I have tried Linux (I installed Slackware 3.0 lats year), but I wasn't impressed enough by its technical merits to continue using it. The RMS philosophy and the GPL intrigue me, but they're counterbalanced by the rest of the crap I see in the "Linux community." On just technical reasons, ignoring any ideologies, I see no reason to switch. Sure, Windows sucks in many ways, but so does X. Windows crashes, but it has a usable, consistent interface. X doesn't crash nearly as often (though XF86Setup required me to reboot a few times), but its interface pretty much sucks, and is not consistent in the least.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd say the reason why the "bulk of the interest is in Linux" *is* in fact (at least partly) due to the GPL. The GPL means that companies who adopt linux have to be very public about it, because the GPL requires them to make their source & changes publically available. In contrast, a company could be running a *BSD kernel in their shiny embedded box and no one need know.
And market adoption is driven by "what the other guys are doing." Because the GPL forces publicity, it creates its own fad, and thus its own momentum. Not a technical reason, but a sheer dynamics quirk. A particularly successful meme.
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First off, I am not a programmer (i can barley spell see pluss pluss). And I use Linux, just 'cause I wanted to try something new (and learn). So...I was look'n around at CompUSA a while back and happened to stumble across a SHRINKWRAPPED box of QUAKE for Linux (and bought it). The BOX/CD Wrap is labeled as such: -Pentium 100 Mhz or better -Linux Installation based on Kernel 2.0.24 -16Mb of RAM for software mode -24Mb minimum for GLQuake mode -Double Speed CD-ROM drive -100% compatable sound-blaster sound card -blah... blah, BLAh......... Any how...at the time I was running RedHat 6.0 and it installed (./setup) like a no-brainer. I have since tried a few other distro's Debian 2.1 - installed and worked (used cpio instead of rpm, it asks you) OpenLinux 2.2 - installed and worked Mandrake 6.0 - installed and worked (a little smoother) SuSE 6.1 - after ./setup it would say permission denied!? So I just used kpackage to manually do it, although I had to tell it to "force" and "ignore dependencies" 'cause it installs "GLQuake" binary (I have a Trident video card). So these folks are smart enough to make shrink wrapped software that works with multiple Linux versions, I don't think they spent years figuring out how.
And each time company X wants the latest features of the next kernel, they will need to re-apply their patches to the unfragmented kernel, or remain using the old kernel. If their patches are worth incorporating into the new kernel, developers will be screaming at Linus to fold it in. If not, they will find it prohibitively expensive to keep re-applying their patches with every new kernel release. And if they continue using the old, patched kernel, they will find themselves at a market disadvantage, eventually to the point that no-one buys their distribution. Fragmentation of the kernel is a non-issue.
Oh yeah, how will we know if their patches are worth applying?
Easy! We have the source. This is how the GPL prevents fragmentation, while the BSD licence allows it.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Their product can be downloaded for free and there are dozens of competitors offering the same thing for a lower price (other linux distros). Let's face it-- most linux people don't need tech support-- and that is the only thing Redhat -really- sells.
Can you say more about what the benchmarks were?
I've read some very convincing papers asserting that various kernel critical paths (and in particular the system call mechanism) are much faster in Linux than in the AT&T-derived unices.
Of course, it may well be that the libraries and userland are faster on *BSD for what you're trying to do. Or it could be that the papers I read lie. I'm rather curious to know which it is.
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Ah... no closed minded single platform bigots suck. For the record yes I agree MacOS sucks but apple hardware uses PowerPC microprocessors which are also the core of the world's most powerful computers....remember IBM's Deep Blue? The only reason you use X86 is because it is cheaper not because it is better. If this was not case PPC, Sparc, and Alpha would have killed X86 long ago.
Ahh, I see..."It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I'll agree that there's a long way to go yet, both for Linux and all of the Open Source movement, but I think this is definetly the direction things are moving in. SGI is in the process of porting some of IRIX's big features towards Linux and hopefully will use there knowledge to make Linux a high-end server OS. The article Friday about Compaq terminating it's NT for Alpha project is also evidence to support this. Sun will probably be the last hold out and they may never go to Linux except through emulation. But they've got the revenue to pull it off. But there is starting to be some reunification of Unxi.
Normally, I try and overlook spelling errors, but when you unload with a mean-spirited rant that criticizes "bad writing," I must point out that you got both "inadequacies" and "hatreds" wrong. And "pitiful" too. Funny, all those are words that describe your post pretty well.
This is probibly the most important part of re-unification. Each *nix has its strength and the convergence of these strengths is an awesome thing.
Even if there is only a few unices, hopefully there will always be many mail transport agents, mail readers, servers and such to limit the spread of a monoculture virus. Microsoft has seriously weakened its defenses by monopolizing its application market: everyone not only uses Windows OS, but reads mail with Outlook, distributes mail using Exchange, serves pages with IIS, etc.
Apache's dominance on the web is potentially a Bad Thing, for the same reasons.
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I agree. The best company-adoption-of-Linux story so far has got to be SGI, who's promised to port the groovy IRIX features to Linux. Iff this happens, then IRIX users might not feel they've been downgraded... but this is a big iff.
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Debian : Ease of updating/upgrading, sytem holyness :), lowlevel power (like slackware), stability, and security. RH: cooperate support.
You, sir, are a clueless numbskull. The Linux community doesn't want you anyway. We need people who actually try to argue and persuade, not insult. Calling someone a "numbskull" because they feel uncomfortable with the amount of chest pounding rhetoric that has infused the Open Source community only shows your lack of tact. As others have pointed out talking to a rabid Linux advocate is much like asking a Marine why they love the Corps, "I love the Corps." "But why?" "I Love the Corps!". This can scare anyone off.
I thought this movement is about choice, apparently you learned your lessons from Ford. "You can use any OS you like, as long as it is in Linux."
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
If you took all the files associated with FreeBSD, and replaced it's kernel (and support programs like ps, lsof, etc) with the Linux kernel (&etc), you would be running Linux. Wouldn't you?
In fact, no. I would be running a FreeBSD system with a Linux kernel. And I suspect it would be pretty much useless.
Everyone is distributing libc6. Some people are still running libc5. Backwards compatibility is achieved by distributing libc5 as well. Forward compatibility is achieved by installing libc6.
Let us see...During the last 6 months, I am receiving about 4 emails a week (on the average) dealing with library incompatibilities between different flavors of Linux. I have seen libc5,
GLIBC, and GLIBC2, each had its own problems. In addition, there are different versions of GLIBC and GLIBC2. Do you actually expect normal people (that is excluding Linux fans ready to fiddle with their system just for the sake of it) use something like this? Even more, do you still insist on the fact that this is not fragmentation?
Has FreeBSD never had changes which are not forward-compatible?
It had. The changes tend to be slow and gentle on the userbase though. Maybe because most of the userbase treats FreeBSD as a tool, not as a fetish?
The whole concept of shutting your computer down is obsolete. First of all, the heating/cooling cycles will shorten the life of your hardware. Secondly, the computing and networking industries are moving to a world of persistent network connections via cable modem, xDSL, etc. Users want acces to their information now. Also, there is a strong movement towards home networking. It would be a shame to not be able to participate in the future of computing because your OS can't be depended upon to stay up and running.
---
Ilmari
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
Umm, the reason why "{Free,Net,Open}BSD runs the {Free,Net,Open}BSD kernel" is that the {Free,Net,Open}BSD kernel is called the {Free,Net,Open}BSD kernel because it's part of {Free,Net,Open}BSD - i.e., the kernel, in those cases, is named for the operating system.
As for Solaris, well, "uname -s" seems to think it's running the SunOS kernel. :-) (And regardless of where you sit on the "SunOS vs. Solaris" debate, the kernel is called the {SunOS,Solaris} kernel because it's part of {SunOS,Solaris}, so the same point applies there.
Linux systems are a bit different, as they've been assembled from pieces constructed and maintained by different groups; there's no One True Linux System, whose entire source can be found under "ftp://ftp.linuxsystem.org/src"; there's no single complete OS from which the kernel takes its name.
No. You'd be running a BSD/Linux hybrid; it would feel different from many Linux systems, as the APIs would be a bit different, the administrative commands would be a bit different, the twisty little maze of "/etc/rc" files would be a bit different, etc. - and it's not at all clear that it'd be less different from a Linux distribution using one of the usual collection of Linux-distribution userlands than those distributions are from one another.
(If you took all the files associated with Windows NT, and replaced its kernel with a Linux kernel, and wrote an "ntdll.dll" that implemented all the NT system calls atop a possibly-extended Linux API, would you be running Linux? :-))
Those hundreds of people might be able to think Linus under the table, but they didn't think up the OS that is gonna put Microsoft 6 feet under.
Except that if you do that, it complains about System.map being for kernel x.y.z while you are running a.b.c, and refuse to load any modules. You have to delete the old symlink, copy /usr/src/linux/System.map to /boot/System.map-a.b.c, and make a new symlink. This is conveniently left out of ther kernel HOWTO.
rpm -i filename Really really hard. Makes my head hurt.
When I get bored by a TV show, I just change the channel - I don't send a letter to the editor. Sounds like you've got some anger and envy at work here, not just boredom.
Do you really think that Linus Torvalds should be the only one to decide what goes into the kernel? Guys like him are a dime a dozen. HP, SGI, IBM and the other bandwagon jumpers have hundreds of people who could think him under the table.
That's what I don't understand. How could any corporation want to rely on the judgement of such a pathetic weenie like Torvalds.
One point Eric Raymond is missing is that the RISC revolution had a lot to do with the fragmentation of UNIX, with proprietary RISC platforms replacing the 68k, which had come to be the pre-RISC platform of choice for BSD UNIX. Consider the list:
DEC: Alpha (after MIPS)
HP: PA-RISC
IBM: POWER/PowerPC
SGI: MIPS
Sun: SPARC
The current trend is towards a single hardware platform (IA-64), so everyone is falling into line behind it.
One thing about how Mandrake is different; I believe that it's optimised for Pentium series processors rather than i386. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure of this.
Well, well. How true. I as the "linux end user" can tell you this: -it IS hard to configure linux -but you can do it -when you program as a hobby it IS the ultimate environment -I don't give a damn about the GPL. -it is LA différence...
As far as I'm aware, development of IRIX may be slowing, but it's far from stopping.
Oh, despite ESR's tendency to assume all things good are a result of open source, it's a damn fine article.
Why was this guy moderated up? All that that this guy did was insult someone for expressing an opinion, and the opinion wasn't really inflamatory either. Isn't the "Linux Community" supposed to be a nice bunch of people? (and not arrogant like the BSD community that i'm a part of?) I say, screw moderation, long live anonymous cowards!
Linux is too chaotic to code for.
/proc, /dev/sound, using x86 specific assembly code, etc. When you code make your code as portable as possible. Learn and use APIs that are supported in multiple OSs and hardware architectures.
.... Windows code is has a sprinkle of 16 bit, 32 bit, it is far from uniform but since it is not open I guess we will never truly know. Linux will do just fine since I can use modules if the sound card code is acting up, I could get rid of it. And wait until a fix. And yes a fix will be soon up since everybody can see the code.
.....
All of this chaos and fragmentation is caused by programming for Linux only. Using
For example if you do multithreading use gnu pthreads.
To reply to the Microsoft internal uniformity rant, Microsoft has tons of APIs last time I remember, AFC, MFC, base API, COM, ActiveX,
To make a long story short the more portable the code the more people see your code, fix your code, enhance your code, hence it lasts longer.
Write once, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite,
I agree with Raymond, actually,I wrote an article to this same effect which was posted in March on Linuxpower.org. You can read the article at http://www.linuxpower.org/display_item.phtml?id=11 1 .
But there is no dispute that the Unix world is slowing unifying. And even as vendors like Sun and IBM try to beef up their own Unixen, they add features to them to make them more compatible with Linux (ie. Solaris runs Linux binaries
I don't think everyone should pat themselves on the back just yet though. There are so many companies relying on proprietary Unix systems with closed source tools (the company I work for uses Solaris exclusivly for everything except a few of our front end apps running in Windows). It will take much to move these companies over to linux.
It would be stupid to tell someone "You need to ./configure that and then run a make. Then you need to do a make install."
./configure, make, make install are the most intuitive statements you could make.
v e people I've seen do in fact shut down properly. The rest sometimes don't even care if they have fsck. And they never forget.
Every idiot knows what the word TYPE means. Sorry, but waht you're complaining about shows inability to teach not a flaw in Linux.
And believe me most people can infer what they're doing from they're typing, as long as you remind them to pay attention.
From that point on
I worked at a help desk, I should know.
Besides, CLIs are easier to teach over the phone than GUIs.
As for those who shut down their PC's incorrectly. I don't have a clue who that is. It's certainly not the majority I've seen in comp labs and while I was working. The most tight ass PC-phobic-I-type-600-keys-per-second-so-I-can-lea
Course there's that granny who needed memory warm-up exercises.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Because Monterey is based largely on AIX which makes linux (and MacOS X Server) look like toys when it comes to real serving ability and stability.
How happily is sun going to fork over the only technologies that are left to differentiate Solaris from Linux? Like NUMA. Will they just keep selling their product as long as theres a poor sucker left buying it? And then embrace Linux before they're crushed in it's path? Will the seperate unix vendors be cutting their R&D departments? Oh so many questions!
To an idiot, an idiot is intelligent. The lack of IQ on Slashdot is amazing. Especially the kids who run it.
Wow. You two are obviously in need of therapy.
Let go of your Mac-hatred, it will make you feel
better in the long run. Just because you
don't like an OS doesn't mean its users are
"whiney losers".
ESR writes: >SGI's recent decision to drop IRIX and focus on >Linux is one telling straw in the wind. Eric, what are you smoking? Have you read too many msgs in *.linux.advocacy? This is typical pro-Linux anti-everything-else FUD. Grow up. T
"End-users", in the sense you appear to be using them, don't use OSS or ALSA; they use applications. If the OS can support applications written either to the OSS or the ALSA API, and you don't have to know which API an application uses, why does the availability of multiple APIs make any difference to the end user? (The same applies to any other situation where you have multiple APIs; OSS vs. ALSA is just an example.)
To what exactly is your metaphor referring? To repeat the question I asked in a previous message - a question you didn't bother to answer - in what way would, say, an office application be an "animal" that "likes oranges" or "likes apples", i.e., in what way would it want to use Linux-specific features in a way that can't be abstracted away? (Don't just assert that it would - without an example, I have no reason whatsoever to believe such an assertion.)
Presumably by "they will not take full ability of the OS" you mean "they do not currently make full use of the OS's facilities", given that you say, right after that, "and when OS-specific features are implemented", i.e. that it's not impossible for them to implement OS-specific features.
By "they will be mere hacks to the metaphor system" do you mean that the UI would have to hide necessarily platform-dependent details because the entire desktop environment will be providing a completely platform-independent metaphor? I have no reason to believe that the desktop environment is obliged to do so; the bulk of the desktop environment may do so - just as the bulk of the Windows desktop environment may provide a metaphor independent of whether you're using Windows OT or Windows NT - but there's stuff under the Control Panel, say, that's not the same in the two OSes (if Windows had this wonderful metaphor that completely hides the differences between Windows OT and Windows NT, you wouldn't have control over power-saving stuff in Windows OT, because NT doesn't have that yet).
In what way is this any different from the problems a Windows user might have if they "get beyond" the desktop and start playing with Your Friend Mr. MS-DOS Prompt? If the answer is "you don't have to fire up a DOS prompt in Windows", then perhaps the answer, for those users, is to arrange that they not have to do so in Linux, either.
"Portable" to what? Pipes are called pipes in all UNIX-flavored OSes (and in Win32, for that matter...), so why would a GUI system have to use "pathway" to make it portable to multiple flavors of UNIX?
For one thing, because, for better or worse, most UNIX-flavored OSes, including Linux, don't generally have file systems plugged into their VFSes to support things such as HTTP or FTP access, which, if the "virtual file systems" to which you're referring are the ones I suspect they are, the VFSes of KDE and GNOME offer. There are some who argue that HTTP and FTP access should be provided through the OS's file system API, and implementations of that do exist (often done as, e.g., user-mode NFS servers, or other types of user-mode file systems, so that you're not obliged to shove FTP or HTTP client code into the kernel).
What do you mean by "object sharing"? Are you referring to the object models like KOM and Bonobo? If so, why should Linux have it at the kernel level? There's nothing Magically Wonderful about implementing stuff in kernel mode; I think the bulk of Windows' COM runs in userland.
One might reasonably argue why the object model should be part of a desktop environment, rather than being a thing unto itself (which could be provided as part of a Linux distribution, say), to encourage non-desktop stuff to use it (COM isn't, as far as I can tell, desktop-only in Windows).
The alternative to a library being? All the APIs offered, at least to programs written in compiled languages, on UNIX-flavored OSes and Windows, come from libraries (or code loaded at run time) - even system calls are called as library routines that contain a trap stub.
You missed his point. The ESR article was not intelligent. Publishing it on Slashdot was totally uncalled for.
Most true, Jedi master. I see that you know the force well and it flows as fluid as water. But the fragmentation does have some valid points. Maybe not to the Linux kernel itself. But the OS in generl, those that are forwared by Debain, Redhat, SuSE, Caldera or anyone else.. File system standards are fine, but I dont really feel this is enough. Recently my company went through a whole regoranization (I was heading it). We moved from RedHat based servers to Debian based servers (some are even running the potato now). I was techinically more at ease with Debian, but, my fellow works, those that learned redhat from a book spent many a day bikering at how ugly Debian was (When in fact it was the other way), and how lost they were when they wanted to do something in Debian vs how they did it in Redhat. For normal users such OS changes are fine, but for adminstrators it means a completely different thing. I had to give quite a few seminars to my fellow works and bosses to make them get comfortable with Debian. Why is this happenning? Arnt they all supposed to follow some standard? even if the packgaging systems are different? This is a sad case and getting worse day by day. libc is another problem, some distrubtions just refuse to go up to glibc2 when others are already in glibc2.1, and some companies just put their newest products out in glibc2.1 (Eg: Oracle), when most ppl are running standard OSes that contain nothing but glibc2 at best. Our Oracle upgrade needed a potato upgrade in debian. This came with it's own problems since potato was an unstable OS. I suspect this kind of frangmentation would keep going on. Why cant we have some meetings and iron out the differneces between where files are stories (file system hiraachey standards) and othes. Till that day, I have to waste more time educating ppl and learning different OSes just to install a linux kernel on a box. good day.
--
This utter nonsense and FUD eminating from Raymond's piece is annoying.
So, SGI (a losing company anyhow) decides to drop Irix (a notoriously nasty UN*X) and replace it with Linux. Does this mean that - as Raymond implies - Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX, etc. are in danger?
Heck no. Until Linux gains some credibility in the *enterprise* market, which has totally separate goals than the academic crowd, Linux will not be displacing anyone.
The more I read at Slashdot, the more I believe Linux will change the world, but then i go to work and my WinNT machine stares menacingly back at me. I hope the future comes soon.
Various distros have their differences, but the fragmentation I see in the future is that of people who are limited to one distro's GUI tools vs those who manipulate of config files, etc. -ffat Tony
I have the impression that Red Hat expects (and, presumably, hopes) for that to change. In their S-1, they say things such as
and
and (in the list of risks)
Whether the bubble will burst or not is an interesting question. I could imagine it bursting (although it's not the only stock market bubble I could imagine bursting...), but I wouldn't assume that it'll necessarily burst because Linux will necessarily remain the province of those who "don't need tech support".
This is a really nice piece of Linux propaganda, which is ESR produces at an impressive rate. However, his assertions seem to be a bit premature, considering that only one Linux-centric public company exists to date. How can one assert that the *nix industry is converging on Linux, when Linux hasn't even begun to experience the level of commercial pressures felt by its cousins?
Yes, it seems that several big Unix players have come out with modest support of Linux. Don't forget, however, that these companies are still massive entities, and the support that most have flung in the Linux direction is so token (for them) that they can hardly be credited with anything but protecting their own potential interests.
Don't get me wrong. I really like Linux. I use Linux exclusively at home and at work. But the Great Linux Migration is still in its infancy, and there is a LOT of room for corruption and division.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Compaq pulled the funds for the further development of a 32-bit NT on the Alpha platform, not NT in general.
A 64-bit NT port has been in the works for a long time, with quad processor Alphas fueling development.
It's not your fault.. Hemos and the Slapdash "journalists" made it sound like NT on Alpha is dead.
I like the idea he has but it isn't reality. He obviously ahsn't tried admining Caldera, Redhat, Turbolinux, and Suse all in one place. I worked in such an environment (a compnay who wanted to verify their product on all of these platforms) They all had their own quarks and bugs and even configuration tools. Caldera for example keeps everything in the rc5.d directory set to start. They don't necisarily start. If you use their stupid config tool you can disable them w/o touching these rc scripts! Suse and Turbolinux had more of the same... No I am not advocating Redhat. Its what I am familiar with so everythign to me is different. Redhat did feel the most intelagent orginization of all four flavors.
I think that change must be facilitated if the improvements are going to push the boundaries of the possible. Easy changes aren't as interesting.
We agree to disagree. That's fine.
[
Yes, but as soon as some /. reader notices the GPL-mandated disclaimer, an article goes up saying "WOW! FooBar systems is running LINUX!!!" and then the tech press --- which increasingly uses /. to do its homework for them --- obligingly follows up with a "mainstream" article some short time later. The press releases aren't required, but the current dynamics make press inevitable.
[
>ftp.kernel.org, but a custom kernel of their own, that differs not >just in how it was configured, but in the code itself.
Umm no. The Redhat kernels make more use of modules than say what Slackware does. For instance ppp and sound are modules with the kernels RedHat uses. You basically don't have to recompile the kernel for sound with Redhat. I know.
I can't believe so many people willingly drink the Eric Raymond koolaid. One bullshit article after another for him, and people are begging for more.
His constant factual errors are bad enough, but what really makes his writing so terrible is the constant fake bluster he exudes. I honestly don't think that he believes a lot of what he writes -- it's as if he wants to puff himself to be some badass cartoon character, always foregoing reality and truth in search of an oh-so-pithy one-liner.
I've written before at Slashdot (sufficiently long ago enough that it's no longer in my User Info) that I think BSD usage will increase and that Linux will see a downturn. And I say this as someone who, while preferring NT and Sun machines, is both an owner (at home), an administrator (at work and home), and a fan of Linux, as well as someone who has never even touched or seen BSD except as a user. If not BSD, then something else, but a lot of people who actually use their computers as a means to get things done, and not as a religion or fetish, are both irritated with and embarrassed by the Linux zealots out there. Count me as one who is considering the switch as well. Plus, BSD will also unfortunately get a lot of the zealots who are currently an embarrassment to Linux -- who will in turn be an embarrasment to BSD -- because they won't feel so 31337 anymore when "the clueless" are able to install Linux.
The King is dead. Long live the King...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The different install procedures aren't the problem, this is rather healthy competition.
Te main problem is the different layout of the distributions, like init.d, cron etc.
Another is different library names (seldom), and, esp. for newbies, differences in RPM packaging, which makes it harder to use RedHat packages on SuSE and vice versa.
I'm very sceptical that the LSB an resolve these questions, as many changes to the distros would be necessary.
As for Mandrake: They try to make aRedHat-compatible distro without all the bugs and quirks (e.g. RedHat's terrible KDE setup).
Something like a RedHat-style layout with a SuSE-like quality.
And they're working on a lot of improvements on their own: Lothar autodetection, KOffice crypo stuff...
Ah, I found an article about the differences here
One thing that struck me in their IPO filing was that they didn't mention other LINUX distributors as competitors, just MS, Sun and co.
This has created the idea at the stock market that
REDHAT = LINUX (and vice versa)
ehich is a bold assumption, given that SuSE is currently LARGER that RedHat both in turnover and profits.
A market value of 500 times the annual turnover is IMO a tad insane!
Av.
Perhaps you would call them both Linux, but I wouldn't; were somebody (perhaps Microsoft, to squelch irrelevant "you can't do that, the source isn't available" arguments) to implement a full-blown Windows environment atop a Linux kernel, without providing a userland that looks anything like that of a Linux distribution, I wouldn't call the resulting system "Linux", because it wouldn't feel like Linux, either to a programmer or to a user - I'd call the kernel a Linux kernel, but that's it.
Yeah, perhaps you could then add a Linux userland atop it - that'd be the moral equivalent of Interix, which provides an environment with a UNIX API atop the NT kernel. Once you added the Linux userland, I'd be willing to call the resulting system a Linux system (just as an NT system with Interix is still an NT system)...
...but that's not solely because it has a Linux kernel; it includes all the other code that makes a Linux system look like a Linux system.
Similarly, a FreeBSD userland atop a Linux kernel wouldn't be a Linux system to me unless the Linux userland was present as well.
Of course, in some cases the userlands would collide - would the FreeBSD-and-Linux userlands atop a Linux kernel have, say, a FreeBSD-style or a Linux SV-style or a Linux BSD-style "init"? Were the system to present both flavors of userland where it was possible to do so, but chose one particular flavor of userland for the stuff where it wasn't, if that was a Linux flavor, I'd call the system "Linux with an XXX compatibility package", and if that was a FreeBSD flavor (or an NT flavor), I'd call it "a hybrid, neither fish nor fowl".
You must think Linux users sit around fretting about conpatibity with other distro's
Are you *BSD users this clueless.
Slackware Linux as a system has been incredinly safe and stable (hasn't crashed on me yet!). None of the utter confusion (including fragmented kernels), which IS happening in *BSD.
My impression is that no-one (except developers) really cares about fragmentation all that much. Most programs written for unix are written well enougth that fragmentation isn't a problem. The interface does not seriously change from unix to unix.
noone listens to me it takes ESR before they listen.. maybe I need to feed him my thoughts .... there will be less UNIX versions next year. True64 will probably become part of Linux, as it is moving that way, and IRIX is already planned to go that way. In order to defeat M$ this must happen. Over the next few years there will probably only emerge 1 or 2 unix or UNIX like versions probabaly comprising Linux code in it. It may or may not be linux, but it will contain much of the kernel code, and many of the OS parts. I imagine it will contain a much improved Java parts too. Possibly some sort of Java-Linux-Unix mix. where the OS runs on most hardware (Linux) and the apps run on most OSes (Java).
Only 'flamers' flame!
"Publically" doesn't necessarily mean "put out a big press release"; it could just mean "put the text of the GPL in your documentation, along with a URL people can go to download the source". I have the impression that one or the other of TiVo or Replay use Linux in their box, but, if so, I haven't seen either of them announcing this broadly (which cannot in any way be taken as a certain indication that they don't use Linux).
Yes, the GPL does require you not to keep it a complete secret that you're running Linux inside your box, unlike the BSDL. However:
First bear in mind that both KDE and CNOME are work in progress. .gz, so there is
Gnome does not deserve to be beyond version 0.1, while KDE just
made it to 1.0 with 1.1.1 release. Neither can be taken as a good
example of Linux desktop. KDE 2.0 promises some real apps, and
so does GNOME 2.0. They will probably have enough features to
be competitive by version 3.0, by which time they may run same
CORBA backend and same dnd so coding for one would be roughly
the same as for another (esp. if KDE adds more language bindings,
regardless of how many people need it).
Most people in Linux world do use zip (gzip), so I am not sure what
the difference is, except that winzip is not available (bfd).
Most compressed programs you'll see have extention
quite a bit of uniformity there.
As far as APIs, it is not clear that it is a good thing to have only one.
Besides, they are in no way a part of the "end-user world".
I do think LSB is good, and it would be better if it were folded into
posix, so that noone out there could ignore it. But one set of widgets?
Yuck. If people listened to you, we'd be using Motif without any
alternatives. IMHO, that's worse than all Windows crashes times 100.
That's, like, ten minutes of work.
For the desktop user the advantage of FreeBSD is that it is more 'consistent', easier to install, configure and maintain than any distribution of Linux I know, but the differences are probably big enough to switch, if you have a system that already does what you want it to.
Read what Daemon news has to say about this issue, also chech the back issues.
---
Yeah, had to be one. Somewhere.
I really don't believe that Eric Raymond represents us (for almost any value of "us" you might care to choose). He seems like an OK guy, but it's increasingly obvious that he has lost track of what we (well, I) thought he was doing - representing us - and is now doing something very different - preaching to us.
Matthew.
If by that you mean "moderated up to 1", the answer is "because he didn't post as an Anonymous Coward"; see this Q in the Slashdot FAQ, which says
I rarely shutdown my machine, but I don't keep it on the net either.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
and which distrobution is linuxconf?
RedHat/Mandrake ships with it.
Works also with Debian, Slackware(?), and (a special version) with SuSE, if you install it.
Still prefer YaST, though.
The pace of change, perhaps, but change is not synonymous with improvement. I'd like to have as few changes as possible, and have each change provide significant, tangible improvements.
Envy!!! Envy WHAT????
Go Hurd!
Alejo.
What's with this title? This article has nothing, whatsoever todo with "The Re-Unification of Linux" ... the re-unification of Unix maybe, but even that's stretching things a bit. How many Linux distros are there? What are the irritating differences between them? Which ones are better for which applications? Answers to these questions would make an article that could justify the buzz-word Linux in it's title.
I've been a Linux guy for a looong time and it's this kind of misleading hype that makes me want to switch to xBSD just so I can hang out with those seemingly less loud and obnoxious BSD people. Is this kind of crap going to drive us linux users into the closet and make us develop secret handshakes and stuff due to the embarrassment?
Hey.... if I write an article about changing a tire and put the word Linux in it, will it get posted at Slashdot?
You have a weird way of choosing what operating system to use.
Why don't you just use whatever works best for you, instead of using whatever OS has spokespersons you agree with?
And what about the "half-truths, omissions, and outright lies" told by the spokespersons for Windows, your current chosen OS?
How bizarre.
Azog
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Thank you for a lucid contribution to this debate, which was, as you need reminding, that ESR is a rabid M$ hater who wont allow anything as dirty as FACTS to get in the way. And there is nothing wrong with being French. I mean, someone has to do it.
I believe that's part of the problem too. Linux has no "feel". Thats the Unix way--has been since the start. Nothing is absolute (or a true/single method of doing something).
/dev/*, pipes, etc. concepts). GNOME/KDE neither take/extend the Unix feel. They more or less transform a Unix feel into a Windows feel. Once end-users of either KDE or GNOME branch off into knowledgable users I believe they will be confused once they see a bash prompt and have to deal with pipes and other Unixish things.
:-)
Personally, I feel it's easier to code in DOS and have to deal with rewriting low-level drivers for an x86 than to deal with writing abstract programs for an abstract computer. With Windows you know you are coding for an x86 (except for NT). You know you are coding for Windows. Every user/programmer of Windows knows what a "Windows" system looks like, feels like, and how it runs and operates. You can't say the same for a Unix-based OS. This is why, IMHO, the end-users (who don't want to deal with complexity) stay far away from Unix.
I think the point I'm trying to make is this: Linux needs a feel.
Once Linux has an 'identity' end-users will come to Linux.
The reason Windows is number one with end users is because Microsoft is a great illusionist. They are Disney of computers in a way. They know how to make an abstract concept (operating system) into something that seems concrete. Thats probably the reason many artists are starving. People don't buy abstract. They buy concrete.
My original post seemed to imply Linux had a feel of sorts. I guess the only "feel" for Linux would be what Unix is (with
As for how to make Linux a end-user operating system.. I seriously doubt it can be done. The more people contribute the more abstract and unfamiliar it becomes. People use language (such as english) to communicate. Windows is english for computers. Linux is a computer without language.
Hope these random thoughts clarify just a litte
The name is Linux Standard Base. You can find more about them at http://www.linuxbase.org/. They have mailing lists for you to contribute. I suppose it is `taking so long' because the number of persons asking why it is taking so long is far bigger than the number of persons actively working on it.
Alejo.
Well, I shut down my Linux box regularly. I live in a small :).
apartment, so my computer is next to my bed and I can't sleep
with fans being as noisy as they are (OK, so the cover on my
case is permanently off
Having the computer running the whole time even if you don't need it is a huge waste of resouces, unless you have a very good power saving system (which is mostly disabled due to problems nowadays).
Todays INTEl(-comp) processors and memory are just too inefficient...
- Tell me which packet hasn't got the right glib dependencies on SuSE 6.2.
- Tell me which packet you need is NOT on the 6 SuSE CD's.
- Tell me what task (like ld.so.conf et.) is not taken care of by SuSEconf.
--> Your case won't ever happen with a 'typical user'!Hrm... ESR seems to be missing the biggest cause of UNIX reunification--the rapidly shrinking UNIX market. Most fragmentation happens when there's plenty of room for everybody. That's why people fear fragmentation in Linux.
The Linux world would be a better place if all distributions used the same package format, the same system management tools and followed the same filesystem standard. The fact that they don't will not stop Linux growth or acceptance, but it won't help it either.
As for ESR's speculation that Compaq will eventually move from Tru64 UNIX to Linix, well, I'm normally with ESR on most things, but on this one I think he's way off base. For the next few years at least. My reasons for this are:
* The Linux kernel has some way to go yet on the scalability front before it could be considered a potential replacement for Tru64's kernel. Compaqs next generation Wildfire systems will be out soon, with possible configurations of up to 256 CPU's. Tru64 V5.* can scale that high and make good use of it. The Linux kernel will need to be able to match that.
* No one does clustering like Compaq's VMS clusters, and now Tru64 UNIX is getting the same functionality. This puts Compaq's UNIX way out ahead of any other UNIX with the rest of the field (and NT) left behind with failover style clustering. Porting TruCluster V5 functionality to Linux would be a big job. New drivers for the cluster software, new hardware (Memory Channel), the new Cluster common FileSystem, the advanced filesystem (AdvFS), etc. I just can't see Compaq wanting to Open Source any of this, as it's what will set them apart from the competition.
Macka
Does Red Hat not make its own changes to the kernel distributed with the rest of their distribution?
Also, you can say that each distribution is a fragmentation. You can't run Red Hat programs on Slackware due to libc problems, that sort of thing.
"By joining the Linux community, everybody wins." Your technical skills will be assimilated into the core of the community.
>Linux and the Linux community are both too >immature to make a dent in places where 24/7 is >a requirement, not a feature.
And you call NT or its ilk 24/7?!??! I've seen Linux boxen running for months without fail, longer, even. Find me an NT server that's run for more than a week, two at best.
If you are referring to legacy Unix distros, however, they still have the upper hand in this regard.
I can't picture it. Sun has made too much of a commitment to Solaris and is still profiting from it. And as much as I like Linux in particular and open source software in general, I must admit that Solaris is a quality product that doesn't need to be abandoned.
But then, you have to remember, IBM ditched its own web server software in favor of Apache, even though it had invested tons of money and resources into its own web server software.
DES Khaddafi KGB genetic jihad Uzi Rule Psix Qaddafi cryptographic Peking Mossad Legion of Doom Albanian Serbian Saddam
Go play with your guns.
Does the fact that FreeBSD implements the Linux API in a loadable kernel module make it Linux too?
I'm saying, write a piece *for* Slashdot. If it's well-written, original, and on-topic, it'll run.
And I'm sorry, Mr. Raymond, but Cathedrals are things of beauty. Your bazaar vision, well... the peasants can roll up the tents and booths and move on when the weather goes bad. 200 years later there is still a beautiful Cathedral standing. There's a bare patch of dirt over there were the bazaar once sat.
Heh, that's a nice one. What is left standing when an earthquake occurs? The peasants kan rebuild the bazaar in a day, the cathedral will need another few hundred years to be repared. And in the case of a flood, the peasants can pick up the wood from the bazaar, swim to land and build a new bazaar.
Point being, don't take the metafoor too far.
TeeJay
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
Use Debian. The Only true dist. +3500 packages with a single command good list support very organized release a solid stable dist
Oops. You don't have the correct version of glib. You need to install the 1.2.3 version, update ld.so.conf which should be in your /etc directory with the path where glib installed to. Then you need to run ldconfig. After that run rpm - filename. Ask a typical user if their head hurts yet? Yeah, I thought so.
Yes! Think of it!
/. on a 2 min refresh so I can be in the GNOW!
:-)
Your Slashdot Title (Score: 3 or higher!)
Your name and cute link
Yes! I can envision myself at the top of the Comment listing, I mean hell! I've got
This is it! This is the one! This post right here will make me famous, and I alone shall represent the community! This is going to hurl me to the top where my dog and I can manage Linux with a birds eye view and I'll never be interrupted by and ICQ message ever again!
Yep. This is the one. I've made it.
Go throw another shrimp on the barbie until you can save enough to buy a clue.
A truly free license, a cleaner install and update mechanism, and the joyous feeling that it ticks off linux users everywhere.
wow...you must really be something amazing to be so much better than everyone else. Perhaps you would like to demonstrate your alleged brilliance sometime?
Juln
da you have that backwards.
Insert mind here.
Strange that ESR didn't mention Sun and Solaris, I would like to have known if he expects them to join the trend.
I can't picture it. Sun has made too much of a commitment to Solaris and is still profiting from it. And as much as I like Linux in particular and open source software in general, I must admit that Solaris is a quality product that doesn't need to be abandoned.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Linus Torvalds and the ravings of Richard Stallman notwithstanding, standard CS terminology defines an operating system as the portion of the system software which runs in kernel/supervisor mode.
GNU is not an operating system; Linux is. FreeBSD, NetBDS, BSD/OS and OpenBSD all implement the BSD operating system, with some differences among the various systems (just as different Linux systems often include slightly different versions of the actual Linux OS).
When I first started using linux, I had the same opinion alot do. It was "all this fragmention in the differnet distros, wms, etc. isn't good"
/usr/lib, install it's binary into /usr/bin, etc. You can talk to 10 different people, and they will tell you 10 different places to put things. Redhat will dump every binary in /usr/bin. People that compile like to put things in /usr/local/bin, /opt/bin, and other odd places I can't even think of.
After you USE it for awhile, you see it's a strong point, not a weak one. It's not like Windows(not trying to bash it here), where using Win95 for anything but a desktop is like putting a round peg in a square hole. A linux distro can be centered around easy to use(redhat, caldera), very configurabe(debian, slack), or anything else. But at the core, it's still linux. Linux gives you the power to shave off the sides of the peg for a perfect fit.
Where linux DOES need a standard is on file locations. Like have a program that's follows the "linux standard" will use libraries in
I like to use both gnome and kde aps, I like to change my window manager every couple weeks. I don't like the fact when I go to compile something, it can't because of a library in a different place then where it's looking for.
So I guess that the fragmention is a two edged sword. But at least it's alot sharper on the good side. I think the sharper side helps shaving that peg (^_^)
The whole reason while hackers develop the kernel is to make something fast, pwoerfull, and sucessfull. I know alot of hackers who were getting bored with linux. They complained that linux is faster then any OS out there and there was no incentive to work on it anymore. Then the freebsd group showed some benchmarks and then mindcraft/zdnet showed tests showing linux performing on par with dos at about %300 slower then windows. Windoze drones gleamed and cheered and became more proudfull that they used windows and now these hackers are saying "Lets make this better and support multiple ethernet cards". The average consumer has no idea that the zdnet becnhamrk had 4 ethernet cards. They think that linux transfers packets %300 slower in every situation thanks to the ms marketing department picking the hardware. My point it that after linux is realized that its not so hot all the hackers will find somethint to do with the kernel. After all the .8 kernels really reaked in comaprison to today's kernels and yet it attracted alot of hackers. I believe the 3.0 kernels and maybe the 2,4 kernels will eventually perform on par with the *bsd unix's and then the bsd users will get really pissed and fix there OS's so there's are faster. It just gets better and better when someone steps on your toes. As long as linux is disadvataged we can expect continous innovations and improvemnts. And for all you bsd guys out there who call linux mediocre I can tell you from experience that there is no difference in performance at my 350 user network at work. Some german magzine did the same test mndcraft/zdnet did and found that linux outperformed freebsd in that test. I think all the bsd guys calling linux barely adaequite and slow is uncalled for. Perhaps there may be a difference at a large volume of users but for 98% of computing linux is the same if not faster then freebsd. THis is just from my own experience and not to casue a flame war.
I didn't miss his point at all. I offered Sam a chance to do something positive instead of complaining. You can do the same. ESR makes his points in a logical manner and signs his name to them. If you don't think ESR's piece was intelligent, go ahead and write one that is. Be original instead of reactive, stick to your chosen topic, and keep it between 800 and 1500 words. And be prepared to get flamed if/when it runs, because no matter what you say, *somebody* will disagree with it. ;-)
I'm not sure why, but I never had to do that. make install took care of everything for me.
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Apparently SGI is not "dropping" IRIX, nor are they spinning off a subsidiary. They do, however, feel that "from an applications standpoint[,] Linux is the right answer".
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well, I can say again, Thank You ESR for reminding me why I use Be. I am sick and tired of the fighting about who has the best distro blah blah blah. Look, I use my comuter to get WORK done, not installing, patching, building and debugging the OS just to run a simple app. Be gives me a superfast OS that has a simple and clean feel right out of the box.
I just test drove two different distro's, RedHat and Caldera. I am sorry to say, unless you have a plain vanilla box, each install craps out. Now, I install my Be in under seven minutes and one reboot. No six-millions questions and blinking screen and scripts that give cryptic responses.
If any of you out there just want a clean, FAST and easy OS, just give Be a shot. You will be pleasantly surprised.
Eric, I hear what you are saying, but you really need to wake up and see the world as it is.
>I am aware of at least 20 distributions of Linux
Um, you're wrong. There really aren't at least 20 distributions of Linux. What you are seeing is releases of Linux that's been customized for particular purposes and given away to anyone who may have a use for them. For example I know of 4 or 5 "distributions of Linux" as you put it that are really linux on a floppy disk to be used as a rescue disk. A lot of the other "distributions" are basically RedHat that's been customized for a particular language, like spanish or chinese. This isn't the defination of fragmentation.
That's, like, ten minutes of work.
;-) Really, I would hate it if I had to recompile my XFree!
I don't know what kinda supa-dupa-fly computer you have, a 1000 node beowolf cluster? I know for a fact it takes a bit more time on my PPro to recompile all the packages that come with my RedHat.
Also, I personally thought the standard RedHat desktop was a bit messy and the folks at Mandrake did a nice job pre-configuring the KDE desktop (add this to the list of differences between Redhat and Mandrake). This could also have saved me a lot of time, I now did it by hand, after which I ended up with a nice (and a bit bloated) mix between Gnome, KDE and Window Maker.
It just looks like Mandrake is the more polished RedHat. As if Mandrake is the RedHat RedHat should have made themselves. Thank GPL and RedHat that this thing is possible.
TeeJay
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
My zip drive and cdr are on the same machine here at work and they do just fine. How good is the software that you speak of? Can it handle multi-session cds? How about a Playstation game?
So the user has to install SuSE? What if they happen to be running Caldera or Red Hat?
SGI is doing away with Irix on anything with a single CPU. When Linux works well on 8+ processor clusters (probably by including a great deal of IRIX code), then Irix will go away on the big iron, too.
Nobody I know at SGI (and I know quite a few of them socially) is saying any different.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Why does slashdot keep running articles by ESR? He's writen jack squat for software (rewrote fetchmail and made a few tiny utilities), is egostical, tries to grab fame for himself incessently, smears RMS and others who disagree with him, and makes false promises. Worst of all, he doesn't even get how free software development works.
More mindless elitism. Nice "community".
-witz
You *did* say that you were considering FreeBSD, didn't you? :-P
But seriously, running an operating system doesn't mean you have to be part of any particular group. You just use it, and get on with your life.
I just don't get it when people say, "I won't run , because advocates are jerks. In case you haven't noticed, advocates of all OSs are mostly jerks (probably including myself). So, by your standard, you'd have to go back to paper and pencil.
Who cares what people who advocate Linux say? Measure it by its usefulness, not by its advocates.
If you prefer Windows, that's fine. I'm certainly not going to tell you that it doesn't suit your needs; it just doesn't happen to suit mine. As others will no doubt point out, X has no interface, since it is a protocol. There are various interfaces that you can use via X, including GNOME, KDE, WindowMaker, fvwm, and, of course, twm. KDE 2.0, slated for early next year, will probably be the most advanced UNIX desktop environment to date. Check it out when it's released. In the meantime, save often. ;-)
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Microsoft works. Some think they are evil, some don't.. I don't care personally. Microsoft WORKS.
Define "works". I'm using Windows 98 on a souped-up Dell PC as my workday computer, and several times a day I deal with crashes and lock-ups. Even simple tasks like writing a document in Word are so prone to crashing that I hit File-Save every few minutes as a hedge against my operating system.
They might not be totally uniform (WinNT->95/98/2000). But they are generally 90% compatible and uniform. They allow people to create programs which run everywhere (Windows is closest to everywhere). Write once.. run everywhere.
While that is Microsoft's definition of "write once, run everywhere," it isn't shared by many people outside of the company. A Visual Basic program compiled on Windows 98 isn't going to have much success on a Linux system or a Macintosh. On the other hand, I'm executing the same Perl script on a BSD system and my Windows 98 machine.
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
You spoil your attempts at persuasive writing with such poor spelling and diction.
Electronic spell checkers and dictionaries are not difficult to use.
Actually, Linus said that you can call it GNU/Linux if you want. I don't know where you got that "the official name of Linux is GNU/Linux" crap. Give me a URL or retract it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
OK, that subject sounds like FUD, but it would make one hell of an attention-grabber if used as a headline for an article. :)
I believe that a strong argument can be made that the oft-reviled fragmented nature of Unix was one of the driving factors behind the emergence of the "share and share alike" Unix software culture which many of us have enjoyed long before the term "Open Source" was invented.
(I would also list a second driving factor, namely the fact that the development of Unix was so fundamentally tied to the development of the Internet, and that Unix users therefore had a means to form a close-knit community from the start.)
For instance, compare MS-DOS. Why did the "shareware" concept take over on that even more prevalent platform and not on Unix? Why did commercial software become the norm on DOS, while we Unix users were used to the fact that whatever we really needed, we could find "out there"?
Because developers could get away with spreading their apps as binaries, that's why.
Binary code as a means of software distribution would never have worked during the early days of Unix, when almost every single installation was so highly tweaked by its local operators as to be a flavour unto itself. If you wrote something cute, you could only spread it as source. Or keep it to yourself.
Even in the early 90's you had to be the size of a Netscape Corp to be able to develop your app for several flavours of Unix simultaneously and distribute the binaries for all of these. Show me the home developer who has a Sparc, an Irix box, an HP workstation and an AIX box sitting on his desk.
If my argument makes sense, then it begs the question whether the emergence of One True Unix (read: Linux) won't have a potentailly very negative effect on what is now called Open Source software.
If it becomes easy for anyone to spread a Unix (read: Linux) app in binary format, won't we see the greed factor (profit motive?) taking over and commercial apps (or shareware or some other form of binary distribution) become the order of the day?
Or is the open source genie out of the bottle once and for all? Will the community factor mentioned above be enough to prevent this from happening?
Just wondering...
+I won't run (os), because (os) advocates are jerks.
Tried to use angle brackets. Arrgh.
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Yes, and then right when that happened, some twit subscribed the l-k list to a bunch of bullshit mailing lists at cnet and so on.
At least one of them had the "name" of Alan Cox associated, presumably to "get back" at him.
So, my assumption is that he pissed in some BSD kiddie's cornflakes and they whipped out the 31337 scriptz to attack everyone. Wonderful.
Why is it that having a dozen vendors shipping products which are only mostly compatible is worse than a single vendor shipping a product utterly unlike anything else? I'll grant you that a dozen vendors being only mostly compatible isn't as good as a dozen vendors being completely compatible, but that wasn't the choice.
No, the "Windows Invasion" had nothing to do with Unix's balkanization (nor would a lack of balkanization have aborted it). Instead it was a consequence of IBM granting Microsoft a monopoly on the PC OS market- a decision no one in the Unix world had any effect over. The Unix Balkanization problem was raised after the fact as an excuse ("it's not Microsoft's fault- really!").
If Balkanization is a problem, then Windows has it as well (NT/2K, 95/98, and CE being three _different_ and only mostly compatible OSs). And thus is primed for a (un-Balkanizable) Linux invasion...
I'm disgusted by this rude and arrogant post, times like these I feel very embarassed to be a Linux advocate.
...who said he expects 3 Unix to survive, Solaris, Linux, and something other than IRIX. Sounds pretty clear to me that its long term future has been de-assured.
--
Infuriate left and right
The ability to make an articulate argument. The guts to stand up for something without hiding behind an AC cloak. You wish you could be like ESR, but you can't, so you resort to tearing him down instead. Really nothing more than self-hatred. Unless you're just one more of those paid MS trolls. In that case, the sun is setting on you and your ilk.
That's true of NetBSD and FreeBSD, but OpenBSD was created because Theo de Raadt was removed from the NetBSD core group, owing to his unprofessional behaviour (repeatedly making rude, insuting comments to users) outweighing his technical contribution to the project.
If one of the key contributors to FreeBSD or Linux was embarassing the project, I expect the others would choose to disassociate themselves from him as well, potentially driving him to create his own version of the OS. Thankfully, this hasn't happened (yet).
My redhat 6.0 boxes use 2.2.5-15 SMP. It's 2.2.5 with some ac patches. I find it very weird that several people seem to think redhat maintains their own "proprietary" kernel or something. Huh? If anyone thinks they have real evidence of this, please come forward with it.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
> [...] why don't *you* write an intelligent piece espousing *your* point of view and send it to me?
OK. Chances are it won't be covered by Slashdot, but it'll make me feel better to write it.
-Sam
Sam
If FreeBSD supports all the things you love in debian, and I already have it installed and like it, why on earth would I switch to debian? There isn't any intrinsic advantage.
What is User Friendly written on? A Windows machine. Why? Because Illiad can't use Linux to do it.
You're right, its at least up to 25 or more now.
Obviously you did not read his paper carefully. Nobody stepped up to take his place so here he is. That was the whole point of his "take my job please" paper. The moral of the story is if you don't like how he advocates open source then do it yourself.
May Linux be harming the 'unification' of unix?
First of all, Linux seems to be pushing the commercial brands of unix out of the x86 market. SCO is in trouble, and I wouldn't be surprised if Sun stops supporting Solaris86. Linux does not seem to have much effect at all on the sales of Windows NT (correct me if I'm wrong, and please include some links inbewteen your insults to back it up).
Besides that, the avalanche of media attention Linux has been getting lately, in combination with the Halloween document (am I the only one who suspects MS may have leaked this to ESR on purpose?) must be greeted with cheers by a certain company that is currently in court trying to convince the US government that it does not have a stable and untouchable monopoly in the OS market. Since none of that company's direct competitors seem to be getting any richer thanks to Linux, it is probably not seen as a real threat...
Of the available unix variants, Linux seems to be one of the 'strangest', least standard (and perhaps least compatible?).
If Linux really does unite the unix world by simply replacing all others, I very much doubt that regular users of HP-UX, Digital Unix (erm..), IRIX, AIX, Solaris etc will see this as an improvement.
SCO, IBM, Sun, HP, SGI and others must be supporting Linux -one of their own potential competitors- for a reason. My guess is they are so afraid of Win2k-on-Merced, that they will support anything thay may slow win NT even little, and are quite happy with the successful FUD campain against NT by the Linux community.
Telling everyone that something good (linux) is actually the very best thing that has ever happened in the history of the universe may eventually make it look like a disappointment.
---
and which distrobution is linuxconf? Unification my ass.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
If Linus plays bad other will pick up. Forking is a serious threat to any free software, and any sensible leader knows how to avoid it. Anyway, one solution is an alternative, more modular operating design. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd Marcus Brinkmann, brinkmd@debian.org
No, but I come with your girlfriends lips wrapped around my you-know-what as I reformat your Win NT server with Debian and take your job away.
I recently bought a Netgear card (which I returned because of bogus Linux support.)
I have found nothing bogus about the Netgear FA310TX card under Linux. I've got two of them in my Linux boxes and they both autodetect under either Red Hat or SuSE and just work. I never even looked at the floppy or booklet that came with the cards.
There is no way around this argument and it is irrefutable.
Oh, I suppose you'll tell me if my grandma thinks linux is too hard to use she can just start hacking some helper apps up in GTK--, right?
Once again someone with a valid opinion is struck down by faschist moderators. SGI is not dropping IRIX anytime soon. They will continue to develop the R14K and even R16K processors. I doubt anyone buying a million dollar Origin 2000 will want to run linux.
D00d.. oracle 8i is already 200mb+ download . 500-1.5 gig when installed with webdb
Most of the comments from Linux users have been open-minded; many even express interest in BSD (not me, I already have to use it, and don't care much for it; I prefer SysV stuff).
The ESR article wasn't outrageous in any way. He merely presented his theory, which you can certainly disagree with. I really am getting tired of all the phony anti-Linux outrage around here. Something doesn't smell right about it.
BTW, the most 31337 of the skript kiddies are now running FreeBSD, because they think that only l4m3rz run Linux. Meanwhile, normal people are using Linux to get work done.
You've got the source code. Put your code where your mouth is.
I'm so sick of hearing these idiots pontificate endlessly.
It's just an operating system...cripes, its just a cheapo unix you can run on PCs. It really isn't anything that prompts one to write an essay every 48 hours.
Ten years from now when linux has run its course, poeple are going to trot out these ESR missives and laugh at them.
If you want true elegance try debian. AFAIK there are no/few GUI tools, forcing one to learn to edit conf files (which are pretty consistent to all distros).
-ffat Tony
The source(s) for NT is(/are) available. I can't seem to find the web page that verified that. :-(
It is not cheap though (and you don't have the GPL/BSD freedom.)
There is an open source NT version being built.
http://www.reactos.com/
Examples? Do you mean "there's no single API to do (graphics, menus, sound, etc.)?" (Presumably not, as you're talking about end-users.)
Or do you mean "there's no single desktop metaphor"? If so, then why need there be a desktop metaphor for Linux, rather than for Linux and other UNIX-flavored OSes? Or are you thinking about the configuration issues where it might be impossible to use the exact same metaphor for configuring all those OSes (although perhaps end-users won't want to configure things at the levels where that's an issue, and what should be done, instead, if possible, is to let them configure the system at a sufficiently high level that said differences go away - or have the system configure itself automatically wherever possible)?
"Knowledgable users" in what sense? If they're sufficiently knowledgable, that stuff won't be unfamiliar. If they're not that knowledgable, they might be equally confused if they see a "command.exe" prompt and have to deal with pipes (which the DOS and Windows NT shells have, although the DOS one, and perhaps the one in Windows OT, may not run multiple commands with a pipe between them; I'm curious whether the NT shell does implement command-line pipes with Win32 pipes), or other such things.
Depending on how knowledgable "knowledgable" is, the "knowledgable" users might or might not have to use a shell prompt; it may be that "knowledgable" users, in the sense of "not novices", would just use some of the less common utilities, less commonly-looked at control panel items, etc. (and I'm not one of those who think this would necessarily be a Great Loss, as long as you can use the command line, edit configuration files yourself, etc. if you're so inclined - heck, when running NT I've used the command line, manually edited the Registry, blah blah blah).
ESR is right in that the huge number of *nix variations are slowly being abandoned. Over the years there have been hundreds of *nix variations, and it got to be ridiculous to try and support an application on more than a few of them.
Its a good thing the *nix vendors realize there is more money to be made in service and support, rather than tricky features and special proprietary hardware. As more of them are being absorbed by the OSS model, they realize exactly where the profit comes from and focus on it.
It would be a bad thing if there were too few *nix variations, as many knowledgeable slashdotters point out whenever there is a melissa style virus sweeping thru the media. If there were only 10 or so variations of *nix just like there are only 10 variations of Windoze, then an exploit could hurt many more people with less effort.
I doubt there will ever be only 1 version of unix in the future, but it would be nice to see no more than 20 or 30, with most of them touting their adherence to a common standard for libraries and structure.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Beware the bogus BSD advocates; many are really not as they appear.
I'll take on his post. The moment I get the position I'll promise never to open my mouth again. I'm sure most linux advocates will mark my tenure as a positive time.
for informing me, but doesn't make me feel any better. Now I just feel that just because I post anonymously my opinions are less valid.
I am amazed at all the Microsoft FUD. Microsoft has what, now, 30 people who do nothing but read Slashdot and spread FUD?
I work for a software vendor. We make commercial software for Linux. It works on all distributions. It ain't pretty to make it work on all distributions (we basically have to distribute a statically linked copy, along with a dynamically linked copy in order to comply with the LGPL), but so it goes. We run our entire internal infrastructure off of Linux, and our developers have various Linux distributions (heck, my desktop is FreeBSD!). WordPerfect and Applix are our internal word processor and office suite, and both work on every machine in our office, even on my FreeBSD box.
In other words, we're talking pure FUD. Yes, it takes a bit of care to make your software work on all Linux distributions, but a commercial vendor can do it without much problem. WordPerfect does it. Applix does it. BRU does it. If vendor X doesn't do it, that's vendor X's problem, not Linux's.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
ESR's comments here truly outdo the negative attitude seen following the RHAT IPO. In fact while taken in comparison with suck.com's article a few days back, it shows how the community is (or at least should be) reacting to the IPO vs. how the rest of the world views what occurred in the community during the past 2 weeks.
He concisely addresses the whole "shareholder demands" argument by showing that these publicly owned companies are seeing that the advantage in adding to the unix codebase via the linux community.
I argued the other day (in response to the suck article) that shareholders outside of the community don't mean squat in the matter of development. And this is precisely due to the way that linux evolves. However, I do believe that shareholders within the community now realize the importance of their contributions since it breaks down monetarily.
Finally, I believe that the end result, once we've looked past the IPO, will be more of the same. And this is good. The group that did not get the letter will still (hopefully) continue to contribute. Some naysayers say the contributions will be due to the promise of tomorrow's IPO and this may very well be the case for some. But I say the contributions will continue since people enjoy contributing.
If RedHat or any of the other companies must develop something to meet the demands of shareholders, then the product must also meet the demands of the community for two reasons.
1. It must be useful for the community for our own reasons or adoption will not occur, causing the doomed fragment to be weeded from the standard Linux distribution.
2. It must be well developed within the community or someone will be compelled to develop something else to compete. And the competing project may indeed have an advantage simply due to the "anti-establishment" vibes that are prevalent within our group.
Well, I'm glad to see another article in which I can agree with ESR. Sometimes they seem far and few between.
And that's my whole take on things.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
You did okay on your FUD Method #1 (exaggerating weaknesses) with the "mediocre device support". But you need to apply some FUD Distraction Methods for the FUD #2 (outright lies) where you state "no meaningful GUI", since Linux has at least two meaningful GUI's (GNOME and KDE). I suggest that next time you try more extensive "Sandwiching" (distraction method #1), preferably by using FUD Method #1 to attack various attributes of those GUI's. Same goes with the 'ages of cruft' and 'so-so performance', you really need to use some distraction methods to make your FUD stick. If you're stuck with how to do that, go to Microsoft's very own "Linux is a poor value proposition" page, which is a masterful blend of FUD#1 (exaggerating weaknesses), FUD#2 (outright fabrication), and FUD#3 ("spinning" a strength as a weakness).
Sheesh, how much is Wagged paying you anyhow? Whatever it is, it's too much, 'cause you're doing a LOUSY job of FUD! I know you can do better, after all, your firm did an excellent job on the "Linux is a poor value proposition" page...
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Your argument has no basis in fact. The OpenBSD fork of the NetBSD code base has proved sustainable, and the code bases have remained synchronised in most areas, but have diverged in others, even though both source trees are open. Putting NetBSD under the GPL would have made no difference at all.
The simple fact is some people prefer NetBSD, others prefer OpenBSD (just as some people prefer SuSE or Debian to Red Hat). Neither is objectively better, which is why the fork was able to take hold. The same thing could very easily happen to Linux or FreeBSD (the divergent Linux distributions are already a significant step in this direction). There is nothing magical about the GPL that prevents this sort of thing happening.
heh heh. one of the few times roblino actually comes out on top. and makes sense too. :)
The differences between the distros isn't that great of a problem. The amount of time it takes to adjust to a new distro is miniscule compared to the amount of time it takes to adjust to your first. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Just sit back while the install sets everything up and sets up /usr/ports.
You'll find updating your source code to be so simple you can set up and automated script to rebuild your system each night if you so choose.
No need to spend moucho dinero on a glossy distro - there's just one, and its cheap. I recommend the subscription if you like CD copies of each release.
If later, you feel like installing software, just go into /usr/ports and type do a make;make install on the package of your choice.
Enjoy your stay!!
Go to http://www.estinc.com
Yes, our shrink-wrapped commercial software product will run on every commercially available Linux.
I am happily running my 1997 vintage Applix Office on SuSE, Red Hat 6.0, and FreeBSD with no problems. So it's not just BRU that runs pretty much everywhere.
Next FUD, please!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Seriously, though, don't forget that a large percentage of us out here don't honestly care if all the "users" ever use linux or not. I use Linux because I spend 10-12 or more hrs a day in front of one computer or another, and crashes/freezes/reboots dramatically lower my productivity and raise my stress level. So I choose to use an OS that doesn't do those things. Some apps look different than some other apps (mostly they all look like my E/GTK theme, but some vary wildly from that), and that's ok by me. Anyone who can't deal with that, I honestly recommend they stick to windows.
Besides all that, I know that if/when the hordes of secretaries or what have you DO start migrating to linux, I'm sure as hell not going to be the one supporting them. So what do I care?
Now, when I do get passionate about this is when someone tries to make ME use windows, especially in a server context. As long as I never have to have anything to do with M$ products, though, I don't give a rat's ass who else uses them.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and possibly those of a large majority of people who don't post on /. regularly. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of the 31337 flamers, and zealots who claim to want "world domination" and are guaranteed to flee to some other "cool, alternative" OS as soon as Linux does become popular.
Does not include tax, title, license, void where prohibited, Canadian winners will be required to complete a breif, time-limited skill test.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Hello,
Good point. We have been having this same problem with our own Oracle 8i installations. I suspect Oracle didn't research much or knew too much, when they put out 8i for Linux.
On fragmentation, I too hope that some of those big distro's would come together and do something about how ugly their FS and others look. Hope these problems are resolved before Corel comes out with their own Debian inspired distributions.
my 2 pence
Why is it that every time an article like this is posted on Slashdot, the other free, open-source Unices (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) are blatantly omitted? Keep on writing like this and you'll have every Joe Linuxuser thinking that FreeBSD is a Linux distribution -- if he even knows it exists at all.
How about making your articles less Linux-centric? After all, aren't we "all in this together?" Isn't it "all about choice?"
-Sam
Sam
Linux is fragmented moreso than any commercial flavor of Unix ever will. (snip) We have GNOME and KDE (need I say more?). umm.. Yes. You need say more, as I don't understand what you're getting at. KDE and Gnome, while different beasts, interoperate pretty damn well. I recently installed Gnome on my (previously) KDE system, and had no problems at all. KDE software ran very well in Gnome (including the KWM!) If you prefer to code for KDE, use QT, if you prefer Gnome, use GTK. Software from one will run in the other.
>Mac-hatred Whatever are you talking about. Apple had the common sense to move to Unix.
are you one of those left-wing manic depressive idiots who doesn't understand simple concepts like markets, greed, and comparative advantage?
You're pathetic. Shriek, shriek, flame, flame. Have you any idea how boring it is to read blindly dogmatic flames from humorless drones like yourself?
I just love demolishing lefties
You mean you love shrieking incoherently at people who are too polite to laugh at you out loud. That's not to say that all right-wingers are cretins, of course; some of them are quite bright. But you're not one of the bright ones.
. . . is more likely than not the work of a moron.
I read his infantile outburst. He wasn't predicating anything on the appearance of a replacement; he said, in essence, "I quit. Now. Period." And then a week or two later he changed his mind and tried to talk his way out of his initial position.
The moral of the story is if you don't like how he advocates open source then do it yourself.
Nonsense. He claims to represent the community. When it finally sank in on him that he doesn't, he threw a tantrum and said "unless some other poor jerk agrees to go to a lot of conventions and shoot his mouth off, I'm going to continue to pretend that I speak for you!" Can you say "non sequitur"? The one has nothing to do with the other. It's like if I walk into a store and start shooting people, and somebody asks me to stop, and I reply, "Hey, get off my case! If you're not willing to shoot people yourself, you have no right to tell me not to!" I mean, I think most of those people in the store wouldn't want anybody to be shot.
(Um, shit, that was a bad example with the shooting -- it's not meant to be a comment on ESR's gun thing; it's just an analogy that popped into my head and I can't think of another one right now. IMHO the ESR/gun thing is totally beside the point. I don't give a damn if he likes guns or not, [joke alert! non-serious remark ahead!] as long as he gives Perens a running start
Every aspect of Linux will fragment just as much as the commercial unices. SCO/HP/IBM/Compaq don't want to leave Redhat or any other company incharge of their OS so they will create their own distributions which will make it easier to support their customers. New distributions will have new ways of doing the same thing. Different librarys, different licenses, different programs...etc. The kernel will eventually split too. Already other architectures are getting the shaft because there is a handful of people who decide what goes into the kernel and what doesnt. It is likely that if company X wants to improve linux with patch Y and Linus says no they will just apply it in their distribution. That is assuming companys ever really adopt Linux. Which I doubt because it would mean dropping a couple decades worth of code and millions of dollars in IP into Linux. Ben.
You don't feel embarassed to post as anonymous coward, do you, Mr. Linux User?
Why the G3, anyway? I've never quite figured that out... I thought it was called 'Mesa' or 'Mesa3D'. It's v3.x right now. Maybe that has somethng to do with it.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I suppose this is nice for the GNU/Linux advocates out there, but...
I can see lots of programmers getting very annoyed about this one and leaving. The reason they're doing this isn't technical superiority, it's cost. By switching, they can remove their own OS teams from the equation and replace them with teams porting the x86 machine code to their architecture (BTW - how long's it going to be before someone reailses that having Linux as platform-dependent is crazy? Assembly code should all go!), thus saving them heaps because they can ride on the backs of the utopian programmers. If I was one of them, I wouldn't want my code being used to benefit all these companies in this way and I'd rapidly stop contributing code.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Would your sample be random? If you took a newbie windows user and a newbie linux user and had each to install the same cd burner in an existing machine who would burn the first cd? If you guessed the windows newbie then you probably guessed right. I'll let our cohost tell you what prize you've won.
The guts to stand up for something without hiding behind an AC cloak.
Flaming AC's for being AC's is the last refuge of a loser with nothing to say.
You wish you could be like ESR,
ESR's admirable qualities:
ESR's big fans are kiddies who think his foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Microsoft schtick is clever. Most of the adults in the free software community are appalled by it. It's embarrassing to be "represented" by somebody as childish as that.
Unless you're just one more of those paid MS trolls.
Oh, great, Slashdot infiltration paranoia. That's even more desperate than flaming AC's.
In that [MS troll] case, the sun is setting on you and your ilk.
The more I see of Linux-friendly idiots like you, the less I think it's going to matter whether MS triumphs or not.
Actually, I am seeing duplication of effort. How many distrobutions now want to make an easy to use and install Linux? Let's see:
RedHat (well, sort of. At least easy installs)
Mandrake
easyLinux
StormixLinux
CorelLinux
Project independence
Caldera
sooo many others too, I've lost count. There's so many distributions now that have goals of making it easy. I think many distributions is good if they all have different goals. But now some distributions are re-inventing the wheel. Let's take Mandrake, for example. The wanted to bundle KDE with Redhat. Fine. Now Redhat comes with both KDE and Gnome, and let's you choose which at install. What advantage does Mandrake have now?
Besides these, there are so many other distributions that all seem to want to do the same thing. So while ESR wasn't talking about distributions, it is time to consolidate, join together and stop obsolete projects. We all know Linux can win with servers and large corporations. The news about SGI dropping Irix and NT is expected. It's time, and we all know it too, to put Linux on the desktop. If more users use Linux, it means less Microsoft monopolies, better software, more hardware support. And right now, Linux has a long way to go. How is wasting effort going to help us get there? Ok, so we have two desktop environments, KDE and Gnome. That's okay I guess. But there is too many options for the user, with none of them being what (s)he wants.
Linux: Long live the source code.
What? freebsd doesn't exist in its own bubble. To start with, let's look at your free xBSD options and tradeoffs.
If you use freebsd, you can't run on a sparc or a sun3, or any architecture except for x86, and recently the alpha.
If you use netbsd you don't get the optimization on the intel or alpha that freebsd has, and I believe that the driver support except on those platforms is lagging. Also the number of hackers available to write drivers is far less then for freebsd.
If you use openbsd, you don't get SMP support. I don't know about drivers on other platforms, but my guess is that they and netbsd do a lot of cross-development.
Heck, if you don't use openbsd then you're constantly playing catch-up on security issues that theo and co. are keeping on top of.
Each bsd has to worry about breaking compatability with other bsds if they want to make a kernel change, or a driver interface change.
In each case you make sacrifices. If a bug is found in any of the xBSD kernels the bug then has to be cross-checked against other kernels, and coordination between groups and regression testing has to ensue. This has been pretty well done afaik, but it's still an issue that the same fix has to be applied to 3 different code bases, and regression testing done seperately (4 if you cound bsdi, which you have to pay for, but which shares code with the other 3).
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
A) Linux has a long way to go before Linux drones like you start taking very many jobs away from NT drones. It may very well happen in a few years (and it'd be nice if it does), but nothing in this industry is a forgone conclusion.
B) All sysadmins, tech support, etc. are drones regardless of which OS they mindlessly fetishize. Get a real job.
C) I assume you're trying to make him cry by accusing him of working with NT. You're an idiot. Raymond mostly appeals to kiddies and suits; all of the serious *NIX-heads that I know just laugh at the guy. He's a joke. For that matter, so are you.
I believe Bill Gates is worth $100bn, and Microsoft is worth about $500bn.
In any event, the valuation of Red Hat is utterly absurd. It's another example of ignorant `investors' throwing money at hype.
One thing that one one had brought up yet is that
many of these unix vendors are also converging their architechtures by saying that they will be moving to intel's IA64 in the future. What converging on Linux will bring to them is a larger binary compatable user base with which to attract third party software vendors. Right now the large number of combinations of unix versions and architechtures is an impediment to getting popular software ported.
the other IA64 factor is that the unix system vendors who are moving to that architechture are probably realizing that it is cheaper for them to help in port of an operating system than to have to do one on their own
I'd have to disagree with that. The main allure GNU/Linux has for me is that it's free software. On its technical merits alone, I don't like it. I've used it before (Slackware 3.0), and I was not impressed. X especially is pretty shitty for a windowing system, unless you need to do networked stuff (which I don't). The whole "configure everything by editing textfiles" thing doesn't impress me either.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Perl 5.004 or Perl 5.005. Netscape or your favorite packet sniffer. You make the call! (What I'm referencing has been fairly thoroughly fixed. However, for almost a month dependency information was a lot like HELL.
--- What we don't know is usually sneaking up behind us as we speak.
What's their stock symbol and where do they trade? man
Well, the main reason I was going to use Linux in the first place was because of it's advocates. The GNU project and free software seem like worthwhile causes. If I ignore the advocacy from both sides, then I really don't have a need to switch. I don't need extensive uptime, and this box isn't a server.
As for X being only a protocol, yes, but it's also the foundation of the whole windowing system. Many of the problems are caused by X itself, and the various window managers try kludges that sometimes work around them, but usually only partially. Even something as basic as cut and paste proves problematic in X, while a 1984 Macintosh can cut and paste between apps without any problems.
Lots of other things seem strange, nonintuitive, or just downright dumb to us Windows users. Why can't you configure X within X itself? What's with the separate XF86Setup? Why do you have to run XF86Setup to run X? Why doesn't X have good auto-detection routines and some decent defaults so you only need to run XF86Setup if you wish to further customize X? Why is installing a new kernel an 8-step process? Why isn't there a decent archiver (one that lets you extract a single needed file, like zip, rar, arj, zoo, ace, etc., rather than tar.gzip which requires you to extract the whole thing)? Why isn't there a decent simple text editor? (no, pico doesn't count, and if you consider vim "simple" you're insane) Why is ppp so damn hard to configure?
I can think of a few more, but that's enough for now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, this is very nice to hear, but I'm sure this news would have a much better impact if it was somewhere other than Slashdot.
I realize that many Slashdot users don't use Linux - I was one of them not too long ago - but I assume anyone who has read more than 2 articles on Slashdot realizes how successful Linux is becoming. Posting an article on Slashdot about this is preaching to the choir.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
It occurred to me recently that the Unix tool model has always been hindered by there being so many incompatible, competitive Unices out there.
Every vendor tries to differentiate their version of the tools. The vendors actually benefit by making you feel uncomfortable on a competitors version of Unix after having gotten used to their way of doing things.
Now, with Linux and Open Source in general, everyone can standardize on a set of very powerful tools. The Unix tool model, which is just so powerful, is unleashed at last with potentially the whole Unix community (and hopefully, eventually the whole World-Wide computing community) in harmony.
It's about time.
(Hey, can I be a "technology evangelist"?)
No more competition on the UNIX market means no more innovation. It's a fact that Linus is incredible tight-asses when it comes to extending and evolving "his" kernel.
Once the vendors figure it out that they lose all control (and at the same time give up their intellectual property), the pendulum will start swinging in the other direction again.
Why would he want to spend time writing something better? BeOS has already been written.
To make programs one has to worry as to which API to use. QT/GTK/whatever. There is far too many choices to create a uniform environment out of Linux. End-users WANT a uniform environment that's easy-to-use and understand. That's why there should be common APIs. And in a way end-users will be involved with APIs such as ALSA and OSS. If you support the newer ALSA and end-user doesn't have it they will be required to download it to use your program. You are asking a person unfamiliar with computers to install a "library" (which it's already hard enough to explain what files are).
What I meant by implementing OS features was if someone working on GNOME or whatever wanted to implement a Linux feature into GNOME it would be a hack to the system to make it work.
About the abstracting of OS specific features.. say you have an office application. This application wants to use plug-ins. Well plug-ins (dlopen) work on Linux, but don't on certain other OSes. Either you make a hack to work with Linux or compromise plug-ins for uniformity. And if the office application does use plug-ins (and is centered around them) then the application will not work on other OSes with that same GUI (usability problem).
In any case with Linux you will not get a program that will run on the exact same hardware, but different machine. You can create a x86 glibc GNOME binary but it's not going to run on x86 libc5 GNOME system. There is just too many variables to make Linux uniform. Microsoft gained end-users by just using x86 and having write once run on any DOS/Windows system.
(Yet again, don't look at me as a Linux naysayer. I'm just saying why end-users crowd will not come to Linux).
Linux can not gain the Microsoft end-user we all know today. Maybe Linux can create knowledgable Linux end-users of tomorrow... who knows.
If you're such a rebel what OS do *you* use? Not the one used by all the sheep I hope.
Not really, do you? If I posted more then I'd bother registering.
Would somebody please write ESR a reality check? He obviously needs one. It's PAINFUL to read this.
First off, WRONG. IRIX is not being dropped, only scaled back. Development will be continued in very limited proportions, and support and bugfixes will be continued.
Secondly, DEAD WRONG. IBM has about fifty times as much invested in Monterey than Linux. I'm not going to cite my sources, but that's fact. They're banking a HELL of a lot more heavily on Monterey than they ever will on Linux. Reason being that they stand to make more off Monterey, since it's basically AIX with iBCS only it's for PowerPCs. It runs Linux bins. So it's got one hell of a leg up on Linux with better corporate acceptance and wider support.
ESR really needs to check his facts before he goes spouting off.
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
your company here.
shelby != ford
That's why potato is called "unstable"...
Geez, just look at his gun totin' writings. Hell, just look at his pictures - a 'convenience' to Journalists. He even has suggestions as to their usage. Ugh! ESR - a real EGO MANIAC. Even by Linux standards!
Do you come with a grammar checker too or is that optional?
Blubbering in his seat, he pontificates about things he knows next to nothing about. Having written a couple of small utils, he's an expert. Expert Bullsh*tter that is. Eric 'Slobbodon' Raymond. The Fat Cat (and I MEAN fat) of Software. The 'Soft Underbelly' of the Community.
First let me say I like Linux and free software.
Lets not try to hide or blur the truth. Linux is fragmented moreso than any commercial flavor of Unix ever will. Why? Thousands of coders. The Linux kernel is a mess of random hackings. We have GNOME and KDE (need I say more?). While Linux is being a good little server OS.. thats all it's good for. You can't sit there and tell me everything will come together and turn Linux into a uniform OS. It's NOT going to happen. Red Hat can change Linux into some semi-uniform beast. But thats just it. It's not OUR Linux. It's Red Hat's.
Without a standards organization Linux is doomed to being what companies like Red Hat want. And since egos are a bigger priority than making SuperDuperWordProcessor work across all flavors of Linux, a standards organization will fail.
Currently, as of 1999, there are Linux users who use GGI. Some use SVGALIB. Some use X. Some use OSS. Some use ALSA. Some use GTK+. Some use Qt. Some use KDE. Some use GNOME. But not two people use the exact same setup. This is why nothing more than GNetworkMonitorUtility or KTetrisDeluxeEnhanced, or perl network-copy-arrage-thingy are coming out (check out freshmeat.net).
Linux is too chaotic to code for. And the programs people want are word processors, office applications and soforth. If you are in the KDE camp all is well. If you are in the GNOME camp all is well. Otherwise its back to Windows for you.
ESR. You are just as bad as Microsoft about bluring Linux (of course your intentions are good ones.. I hope anyways).
Okay.. one last rant. Microsoft works. Some think they are evil, some don't.. I don't care personally. Microsoft WORKS. They might not be totally uniform (WinNT->95/98/2000). But they are generally 90% compatible and uniform. They allow people to create programs which run everywhere (Windows is closest to everywhere). Write once.. run everywhere. Linux on the other hand is write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Two software ideals clashing. Unix has always been "write portable". Windows has always been "write uniformly". You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Let me explain why KDE/GNOME will fail. They are aiming for portability. They aren't designing FOR Linux. They are designing for an abstract computer which does not exist (and never will). GNOME will never take full ability of Linux, nor will KDE. They will feel so foreign compared to how Linux runs.
In my brief experience with Linux, I found the mix of libraries and incompatible packages/packaging schemes to be a bloody mess. So, yes, I did fret about RPMs designed for this or that distribution not being compatible with my system.
My experience has been that the BSDs can actually run each other's binaries quite a bit more easily than the various Linux distributions, due to a more standard structure under *BSD (file-system layout, standard tar-based package distribution, etc.).
...but it seems to me that any so-called unification of this past year is overly connected to ESR's own style of [Oo]pen [Ss]ource. If 'unification' means 'comercialism' (and hype) we'd better hope that big biz doesn't just up and wreck the freedom of Linux (fat chance).
I'm certainly not a religious fanatic in the o'reilly vs stallman war, but if 'unification' is 'interoperability' he's obviously forgetting other (more?) important details such as posix, gcc [and gpl in general], and gnu tools.
Perhaps if 'unification' simply means 'common enemy' then we should thank MS more than linux, har har. Keep MS running then, I say, otherwise all the distros (at least those who are big biz wannabees) will start their own embrace and extend tactics.
If 'unification' means 'locked in to the Linux' way then perhaps we'll all just be chained again to another one true way [sic] until new freedom fighters emerge to release us from the tyranny. *nix may be flexible a stellar OS, but this is, after all, only perhaps the second day of creation in computer history.
If 'unification' means 'eyeballs', then we're really screwed up to think that having everyone Linux-enabling their software is going to make the world a better place. Don't forget that every one of those publicly gambled companies is bound by law to serve the interests of their gamblers (oops, stockholders) alone, and will simply change their biz strategy away from open source the moment they feel it doesn't serve them any more.
Are we stupid, or what? Of course these big companies like SGI, IBM, and many more, want to line up behind *nix, and want the latest buzz to succeed. It releases them from subservience and/or fighting over the crumbs that MS leaves behind in the mass consumer world. It is not that traditional UNIX has failed them technically up until now, it's just that it doesn't have the buzz.
Oh well, enough flame bait for one night (berlin time).
Just one distro is a bad thing, especially in regards to linux. Here we have a platform where distros can compete and leapfrog each other because they have access to the source to their opponents improvements. This is great. Not only that but all the other little things that differentiate them and give you choice while still enabling you to run the same programs and window manager. I recently switched from RedHat to Mandrake because I could download the .iso and burn the cd. Maybe when RedHat offers an .iso and has a little better kde integration (like having qt-devel install by default when I choose X development instead of just gtk) I will go back. Mandrake is great in that it is the same as redhat in all the important ways, but has differences and additions that I like. And if X RedHat based distro comes out tommarow that has the redhat base I know and love and some additions I like I'll use that too... It is called the GPL and it and competition inside the community is a "good thing". And for all you people who are going to Debian flame me I am used to the redhat file tree and package management, and it offers me no reason to learn a new one, however effortless it may be, right now. And when it does my fav RedHat based dist will grab it and incorperate it. And to give my $.02 on the flame way up there debian, redhat, slackware are all linux, they have pretty much the same programs and libraries, and if you can't figurure out how to download and install new/different versions of those libraries than you deserve to be confined to windows and install shield IMHO.
I once had an NT machine that was up for 9 months.
The problem I've had with NT isn't that it crashes (my NT machines don't crash), it's the fact that in-use files can't have filenames unlinked, so you have to reboot the system every time you want to replace one.
This is a huge flaw, and I can't understand why Microsoft haven't done anything about it.
They have to realise SuSE (or FreeBSD) is better! ;-)
I am just starting to use Linux for my first time and have a tid-bit towards all the other comments.... As long as there are billions of people under the sun you will always have a different way of achieving the same goal. Linux will prove to be a very good operating system (the means a user communicates to his/her cpu via. any kernal) and will go through many some thimes painful growth problems. I personaly don't think it will come back together as 'one' and only 'one' os. e.g. Look at how many religions have split from each other to form a new belief based from one book. The same may apply towards computers.... We may see some distributers merging and compine forces with new/old companies but until then we will still see vast differences in the os world. We have many PC/UNIX/Linus/and many other os-es using a computer. I personaly have been using the Macintosh platform for many many years and before that have use other types since close to the early times of the personal computer. I have come to love the the Linux custimization of things and want to continue. I do believe in good causes but I have not yet seen the perfect os of all computers just yet. Until then,.. let Linux florish together..... End of Line
Anyone who was at Siggraph and talked to someone at SGI understands this. It's time is limited. The decision has been made to phase out IRIX. Of course it can't happen overnight, but it will happen.
Use your brain instead, who cares if someone makes a typo or doesnt spell right, as long as ya get the message across. You should still be able to overcome a few syntax errors
To which sample are you referring? The "90%" sample? Yes, it'd be random, in which case, as I said, I suspect that 90% of them have never tried to get anything to run on Linux, as they've never tried Linux.
Spiffy. Do I win the two-week vacation in New York? (If the fact that I guessed the Windows user would probably burn the first CD, at least with the current state of Linux, comes as a surprise to you, you might want to think about checking your prejudices at the door next time. Hint: just because I indicated that your statement about "90% of computer users can't get anything to run on Linux" was rhetorical rather than realistic, because "90% of computer users" haven't tried Linux, that doesn't mean I think they'd find Linux a snap at present. That doesn't mean that this will never change, although I suspect that, as a mass-market OS, Linux is unlikely to be more than a runner-up in the near to medium-term future, and may never be more than a runner-up - but that may be sufficient to let it be a reasonable desktop OS.)
This wouldn't bea problem if Oracle, and anyone else distributing binaries would compile them statically. The whole reason of shared libs is to make binaries smaller (among other things), but I would much rather d/l a 1 meg binary, and run it right away, instead of a 200k binary, and then the proper dependancies. Fragmentation isn't a problem between distributions, the only real difference between them is how init is handled, and package formats. Sometimes files are placed in different locations, but how big of a deal is that? This is more of a problem w/ people not knowing how to use their compiler. You don't want to have dependancies on libc-X.X, etc, you compile w/ -static, and the problem's solved. At that point, anyone who ca run ELF binaries on their box can run your binary (hopefull there aren't people still running a.out on their system...) -dilinger
I agree.
Yeah! Since ESR is so desperate to hand his self-appointed job on to someone else, I'll take it! Lets see, gain 50lbs, get some really greasy hair, bad-mouth M$ when anyone will listen. Oh, yeah, and even when they are not listening, just write something anyway.
a clue. Flexibility is one of the best things about linux. I can make my computer look and run the way I want it to look and run, and you can do the same to yours. Its all about choice (FREEDOM). Thats why I use Linux, for the freedom. Most of that freedom comes from the GPL. Sure MS works, but it doesn't give you freedom. I don't understand your comment about Linux being chaotic to code for. I don't understand your comment about KDE and Gnome not designing for Linux. Theres a reason we have portable languages like C. Do you want them to code GNOME in x86 asm? No thanks, I would like to run Gnome on my apple powerbook. Smoke better crack,
You initial comment is a bunch of BS. If the only reason that you still boot into that other OS is because of what a man says, then you truly do not understand computing and I would dare say that you don't even know much about Linux either. Linux is not about what a person says, but about what you can do with the technology how you can make it work for you. It is not about what ESR may say. That's like not going to your favorite dance hall because some jerk decided to dance with your dance partner and you decided to pout about it.
cd burning is trivial in linux. Debian includes CDR-Toaster (http://www.jump.net/~brooke/cdrtoast/toast.html) so if you have such a device, the burn is merely a matter of running the program. It's probably on a menu somewhere. Coming from a windows support background, I know exactly what it takes to install and burn on a cdr. It's non-trivial. And if you add a zip drive, your cd-burner stops working. Not in Linux.
NT loves you, Linux wants your soul.
Great response, that should have been the end of the paper.
SGI is dropping IRIX. They're spinning off a subsidiary--very likely because SGI has contractural requirements to support IRIX. SGI itself is switching to Linux.
Your 50x figure is probably right. Given the higher development costs associated with proprietary software, the fact that it's a multiple of the resources devoted to Linux is not a good refutation of ESR's point.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Just some food for thought. .2 Billion dollar company.
RedHat is a 4.5 Billion dollar company.
SGI is a 2.3 Billion dollar company.
SCO is a
It's funny. Wall Street understands it better than the Unix old timer bigots.
One problem I can see is that vendors with custom Unix versions will probably be unable to contribute patented ideas to Linux, though I'm not sure about this. It may also happen that, if Linus can't be persuaded to accept enough contributions from large companies, one of them could decide to start maintaining their own branch of the kernel, which would probably divide the Linux base between corporate/hobbyist users again (as the former would be more likely to use the "corporate" branch of Linux).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I'd say ESR is one of the main reasons I'm still using Windows rather than Linux. Articles like this, filled with half-truths, omissions, and outright lies are what's kept me away. Of course, ESR isn't the only guilty party, much of the Linux "community" behaves likewise.
IRIX is not being dropped, nor is it being replaced with Linux. IRIX is still being supported and developed for SGI's high-end servers, which Linux cannot, and most likely will not, run on. Linux is for low to mid end computers, not enterprise-class servers. That's what IRIX is, and will continue to be, for.
Linux is not "re-unifying" UNIX. There are still many different fragments of UNIX, ranging from Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris. The various BSDs seem to mess up ESR's arguments, so he just omits them. Typical.
Anyway, RMS's writings had almost convinced me to switch to Linux. Bruce Perens has done a good job as well. Unfortunately, the rest of the Linux community, along with ESR, has done the opposite. That, and the fact that I REALLY dislike X, is going to keep me in Windows, at least until I get some spare time to install FreeBSD.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Oh their users go on about their techncial exellence and talk about how much more secure and stable they are. Tell any one of those fuckers to PROVE it and he'll sputter and stammer and make a fine noise. And that's ALL he'll do.
Yep and theres Libc and QT. Trying to support it all under linux is a mess. Also, there was another developer trying to make an IRC client for Linux, he had such a hard time getting to work on linux because ever one had different version of QT, he just quit.
Anyone who wants to have commercial apps run on their dist will have to maintain a directory structure compatable with, well, RedHat.
And checkout the Lothar Project>.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
If you are looking for whiney users, the place to go is the Macintosh.
Mostly the BSD community has been quiet. With the rationalization of 'we work, and thats what we care about'. If they whine, its in thier own camp, and don't come to the GNU/Linux camp and whine. (What the hell would be the point of visiting here saying anything anit-linux? Its like kicking a fire ant hill)
When the BSD population gets an infusion of Macintosh blood, (mac OS X) I expect to see the whineyness level to rise.
I'm a new Linux user, and if you go to #linuxhelp and ask for assistance, the first question people ask you is, "What distro are you using?"
Just to drive the point home, I recently bought a Netgear card (which I returned because of bogus Linux support.) Anyway, in the readme that came with it's "special" tulip NIC driver, it had instructions for Red Hat systems, and for SuSE systems.
In my opinion, Linux is already pretty freaking fragemented.
C'mon get with the program.
We have 40 some distributions. VA is Linux centric, PenguinComputing, Tons of advertising magazines cover Linux/BSD/Unix topics.
Second and most important: Who just declared war RedHat vs Debian or IBM and SCO vs SUN and Compaq?
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
To make matters worse he trots out his questionable missive in front of raving converts who preach "linux forever" regardless of any external stimuli.
How nauseating.
VARIETY IS GOOD
Why on earth would you want to strive for one OS? Hasn't the Win32-uber-alles debacle convinced you of the need for alternatives?
LINUX IS A JACK OF ALL TRADES IN THE COMING AGE OF OS-SPECIALIZATION
The thought of linux on everything from mainframes to handhelds scares me and it should scare you. One piece of code cannot perform well on all platforms, particularly platforms ranging from handhelds to big iron.
ENSLAVED BY AN IDEA
The GPL is not a panacea. It is a untested string of characters. If you place your faith in this string of characters wiping out opposition, I'll just move to China, violate it, and laugh at you as you fill out worthless documnents in American courts.
VARIETY IS GOOD - VIVE LE DIFFERENCE.
Linus himself has been quoted as saying that Linux is the kernel and the userspace. So, its MORE than the kernel. Your hi-lord has said so. He also has said the official name of Linux is GNU/Linux. Either: Linus is not the hi-lord and last word OR Like the word hacker, it doesn't matter what any 'computer techie' would define the word, it is how the mass media defines the word. In which case, GNU/Linux becomes part of the vilian...Micro$oft.
Linus himself has been quoted as saying that Linux is the kernel and the userspace.
So, its MORE than the kernel. Your hi-lord has said so. He also has said the official name of Linux is GNU/Linux.
Either:
Linus is not the hi-lord and last word
OR
Like the word hacker, it doesn't matter what any 'computer techie' would define the word, it is how the mass media defines the word. In which case, GNU/Linux becomes part of the vilian...Micro$oft.
That's where he's coming from.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
just read the labels on the boxes. you don't even need to peel of the wrap to figure this out.
X86 assembly is nice, coding in ASM makes the software faster. Also, who gives a fu** about your power notebook. Apple computers suck.
Sane release schedules.
CVSup.
I don't see any ill-effects of the fragmentation of *BSD linux users rave about.
What do I, as a FreeBSD user, care about NetBSD users?
It matters as much to me as Solaris releases and code do to linux users.
The market will decide - if Sun makes money with proprietary products, great. If not, they can join the Linux crowd.
What makes an OS standard?
Because someone has said so? (Hint: this is why the linux camps all point to the kernel as the standard, because any other pointing is to environments that aren't 'standard')
What is the most *IMPORTANT* OS standard?
The ability to take a binary that is labeled for (Mac OS, Windows, Linux) and **IT WILL RUN** on the system you have that *IS* the OS listed on the box.
Now, heres where the whole Linux thing falls down. If I go buy a shrink-wrapped binary, will it work with 'my interperation of Linux'?
Be that RedHat, Debian, SUSE, Solaris linux emulation, BSD linux emulation, whatever.
As a consumer of shrink-wrapped binaries, the answer is not a firm YES, like it is with Mac OS or Windows.
When a vendor announces LUNIX support, it is Linux support for RedHat. Or some specific Linux version. Of the 25 vendors announcing Linux support whom *I PERSONALLY HAVE CONTACTED* asking if the plan on supporting Linux in the forms run on BSD or solaris or SCO, ***NOT A ONE*** has said yes, they plan on making sure their code will run with *ALL* Linux implementations, be they RedHat, Debian, BSD emulation, Solaris emulation, whatever.
The *OTHER* vendors have attempted to 'join the big tent' of Linux, (by offering emulation, a rather simple task, compaired to emulating other shrink-wrapped binaries) it seems no one who is handing out the invatiations to the tent is mentioning that the emulation market exists or even matters.
So why is no one asking (besides me) vendors that their shrink-wrapped binaries will work with ALL Linux systems, including Solaris, SCO, BSD?
Want a LSB? Support the emulators.
I suppose the fact that 90% of the computer users out there can't get anything to run on Linux is a figment of your imagination too. Linux makes a better server but will NEVER make a better desktop .
Eventually, the Linux kernel will be kept alive by corporations who has an interest in the kernel because they can make money off it. These companies might be working together to reunify Unix, but we'll see some fragmentation between companies and the bleeding-edge hackers. And I think we'll see this very soon.
Secondly, DEAD WRONG. IBM has about fifty times as much invested in Monterey than Linux. I'm not going to cite my sources, but that's fact. They're banking a HELL of a lot more heavily on Monterey than they ever will on Linux. Reason being that they stand to make more off Monterey, since it's basically AIX with iBCS only it's for PowerPCs. It runs Linux bins. So it's got one hell of a leg up on Linux with better corporate acceptance and wider support. ESR really needs to check his facts before he goes spouting off.
If you cant give references to your claims then the only one around here spouting off is you. "I'm not going to cite my sources" indeed. You wont cite them because you have none, otherwise you would have.
You have been assimilated.
.
Are you linux users this clueless????
FreeBSD as a system has been incredibly safe and stable. None of the utter confusion (including fragmented kernels) which IS happening in linux.
Is SGI really dying? I thought these guys made the best graphics computers around.
Jeez, man. Pull your head out of your ass. I'm a poor college student with a small budget, and I'm no genius- but I can make Linux do wonderful cool things like play my damn StarCraft game whenever I find the need to. I can use it to write my term papers, my reports for French (because of the incredible internationalization) and all of my presentation crap. I'm not that exceptional- maybe you use the wrong distro if you can't get anything done on Linux.
I mean, what else do I need from a computer? I can do email, type my papers, make presentations (with the KOffice components, which are a blessing), do 2D and 3D graphic design (GIMP and Blender), use the Net with Netscape Communicator or Mozilla, program in various languages (C++, C, Python....), Instant Message with my friends, and play the greatest computer game of all time- StarCraft. What else could you expect from a computer? I don't know, but I also expect it to stay up for weeks and months at a time- which Windows FAILS at miserably.
Peace, and maybe it's time to re-check some of what you said.
I assume that's rhetorical, as I suspect "90% of the computer users out there" have never tried Linux, and not just because they think it'd be too hard to make it work. If 90% of the computer users out there wouldn't be able to get anything to run on Linux were they to try, then, as you note, Linux wouldn't make a better desktop, at least for that 90%.
I suppose the KDE and GNOME desktop environments and the kwm, enlightenment, and blackbox window managers I use are a figment of my imagination.
I suppose the fact my Cyrix 6x86L 200 (150 actual) stands up to my friends' P233s Winblows machines except when playing Quake is another figment of my
imagination.
I suppose the fact that every device except my Windows only printer works is yet another figment of my imagination.
I also suppose that the hack I downloaded to drive my printer doesn't really work because we're talking about a windows printer.
At least have the guts to use a login name.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Thus, your response had nothing to do with the message you were responding to. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
What happened to that Linux Standarization project (sorry I can't even remember the name)... They were going to have a base distribution which every other distribution would have to be compatible with to be considered part of the standard. I remember Slackware refused to participate and Bruce Perens (I think) got in an argument with the group then I never heard anything about it again. Are they still working on it?? If so, why is it taking so long?? Just wondering, because the longer we wait the more fragmented linux will become and more and more difficult to standardize!
"I'm still using Windows rather than Linux. Articles like this, filled with half-truths, omissions, and outright lies are what's kept me away..."
So you are saying that you use MicroSoft, because they never resort to "half-truths, omissions, and outright lies".
Please reread your post and maybe you will realize how ignorant it actually was.
As far as your opinions on ESR, I tend to agree. After reading C&B, every other article/paper I read for entertainment only.
Awesome!
That seems to be what ESR is saying. "We've got Linux, what else do we need? Linux is the One True Operating System!"
Personally, I'm glad that (to use his cited example) OSF/1, er, Digital Unix, er, Tru64 is still around.
Lack of diversity is always bad.
--BIFFSTER, BeOS and NetBSD wanker
'nuff said.
Who cares about the infighting, and FUD articles..
I use Solaris/Irix at work.
I use Linux at home.
Who cares about the.. "DistroX sucks DistroB Rocks". I use what works for me. I am especially sick of the "Linux in the Enterprise" arguements. I love Linux, but try to put it on one of my E4500's and I'll kick your ass:)
Awesome!
ESR, having confessed that M$ 'bullied' him in his younger days, really needs help overcoming his inadiquacies and lack of confidence. His strategy is simple; spurt out a badly written, badly researched piece of Linux propaganda to the cheering Linux masses, and... his ego is restored for a few more days. But he needs your help. So no matter what crap he writes, just remember to congratulate him on supporting Linux and overlook his personal bias and irrational hatereds. He needs you more than you need him. So, fellow /.'ers, please be kind to ESR. He is a pityfull man going nowhere - and he knows it.
I thought he took his marbles and went home a while back? "You won't have Eric Raymond to kick around anymore! And we're keeping the dog, too!"
Yah yah yadda yadda yah yah.
God, this guy bores me.
are you one of those left-wing manic depressive idiots who doesn't understand simple concepts like markets, greed, and comparative advantage? How's that for a troll? (I just love demolishing lefties, especially high-brow European ones, and I orgasm if I'm debating someone who is a French socialist)
You know, the only reason I read Slashdot any more is that sometimes somebody posts a right-wing maniac troll. There was one in the Army/Jini discussion yesterday, but dammit, nobody bit. I should have. I really should have. Now I have to live with the guilt. Maybe the recent outbursts of real right-wing mania in public have spoiled the humor in it . . .
Ah, shit. I don't see any right-wing maniac trolls in this discussion at all (except for ESR himself
Why bother? Why fucking bother . . .
The slashdot zealot attitude is getting ridiculous. For years, they wanted choice in OSes, they finally got it.
Now they want to destroy all other OSes.
Linux isn't bleeding edge, isn't interesting technology. The kernel is not modern. X is a horrible protocol and windowing system. (NeWS and 8 1/2) Yet, Linux advocates would love for it to be "locked in" and dominant. Despite the fact IMHO, both Linux's kernel and X need a redesign.