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Dave McAllister (SGI) on Linux and Chilli
Mintslice writes "Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy has been touring Australia recently. The Age is running this story about comments he made at at local LUG (LUV). It runs over SGI's intentions for Linux, what they're doing to help development, what this means for marketing at SGI, and a treasure trove of bits and pieces including Chilli Recipes. Something for everyone. "
I agree that Linux is becoming a desktop competitor, but I don't see it replacing Windows for the point-and-drool folks anytime soon. (Perhaps this will change with time.) However, I do see it becoming more popular among advanced (intelligent but non-technical) users. Still, that figure maked me question the objectivity of McAllister (or the accuracy of the article).
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Have you seen this page? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ Haven't really looked at it but it looks like it's got plenty of info
"The open-source community is a good imitator but not a good innovator."
Correction, the Linux community is a good imitator.
Open-source (Apache et al) doesn't IMHO fit into that category.
Linux is open-source but open-source is more than just Linux!
The statement that the open-source community is not a good innovator is, like most complex issues, both true and untrue.
On the one hand, only the most blind of observers would suggest that novel products are not emerging from that quarter. The sheer volume of announcements on Freshmeat is just flabbergasting, and scattered like jewels in among the 95% of fairly ordinary stuff are some really excellent software products and many priceless ideas.
But on the other hand, and maybe this is where SGI is coming from, innovation in the Linux kernel is comparatively minimal. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say that it is stifled, but the fact remains that the choice of which ideas are accepted into the official release and which are not is in the hands of a very few people (maybe three or four, or possibly just the one). That must have an effect on innovation, however much we respect the people in question.
As a little example of the above, the DIPC project implemented a gem of an idea (I have absolutely nothing to do with it, by the way): allowing processes that communicate through System V IPC mechanisms on a single host to do so even if they are on different machines, while maintaining 100% compile-time application compatibility because the only difference at the API is a single bit in the IPC headers which you'd flick off or on for single or multiple machine operation. That's innovation, usefulness and elegance rolled into one. But no, Linus didn't want to put it into the standard kernel, and to say that the developers were greatly dispirited is the understatement of the year.
It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It is so easy, as you also point out, to give examples of revolutionary open source projects. What would the PC market look like had it not been for WWW browsers and servers from CERN and NCSA?
Open source projects, from time to time, do outrageous things and MS will have to shell out more billions of dollars to mirror open source projects.
I think this is an example of something different. I was using finger and talk ten years ago for instant messaging. It worked excellent (finger was much more useful then than today and talk was simple and convenient on a text terminal) and surely it was open source? But commercial messaging systems has taken over because commercial companies rule the desktop market and probably also because of marketing. How much marketing does an initiative such as Gale get?
I believe the strength of commercial companies is in grabbing market share more than innovating. This may change with Red Hat et al. We'll see.
Lars
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Reality or nothing.
Microsoft has been uttering the word in every other sentence, but it usually means buying or stealing someone's ideas or technology, seizing the market by force, and taking credit for it.
There are orders of magnitude more innovative ideas at my company than there are developers to implement them, and most of them would just make our software more complex and unwieldy.
Probably the most difficult part of designing GOOD software is knowing what to leave out. Conservative judgement is called for in a tool that many people depend on--otherwise you end up with Windows! Sure, let's throw a graphics API into the kernel! Let's download COM objects into our browser that can do as they like! Let make every piece and every layer interconnect with every other piece and layer so the whole thing becomes a huge Gordian's knot that even the sword of the U.S. Government can't slice through!
A conservative approach means some worthy features will be left out, but it's a lot easier to add a good feature later on than to take out a bad one. One of the more innovative languages I know is Oberon, a language that can be clearly and unambiguously defined in fifty-odd pages, as compared to the hundreds of pages needed to define C++, which is still ambiguous and subject to the implementor's interpretation. Technologies like CORBA existed long before HTTP, but the web wasn't built on them. HTTP was innovative in its simplicity!
Whatever one's take on the platform, one of the big reasons for Java's popularity is that the language has been simplified considerably from C++ and the developers tried to use only tried and true features. Of course, now I hear they're reconsidering operator overloading--don't get me started...
I submit that the best way to encourage innovation is to resist the urge to fold every new feature into the core, instead adding only those features that are absolutely essential to allow multiple, competing innovations to be created on top of them.
The open source community, especially the Linux community, has been accused of "chasing tail lights." I think that this is not only valid, I think it's not the least bit shameful! After all, in a race, on must catch up before pulling ahead, and in some circumstances it is best to let others go first, especially where dead-ends and rickety bridges are concerned.
The strength of the open source community, as I see it, is that on the whole it seems to distinguish between innovation and feature-itis. Perhaps the most "innovative" thing one can do sometimes is make the damn thing work before adding more features! Now I would call that down-right revolutionary!
Brent Rowland
100,000 lemmings can't all be wrong.