I knew Mike professionally for about twenty years. I visited him at BRL several times, and chatted with him at some of the early UNIX meetings. He and Doug Kingston (now at Morgan Stanley Peat Marwick or whatever they're named this week) made a teriffic team in the days when keeping a national TCP/IP net running took the cooperation of everyone involved. When the main routers were LSI-11s, you needed to know the tricks, and Mike knew them all.
He went the extra mile to help people all over, though it was no part of his job to do so. BRL didn't treat him as a sinecure and let him have his head. He put in a full day doing BRL stuff and then helped other folks around the country on his own time.
He was just an all-around great guy. One of the First has died.
Which registrar gets to register Chinese domain names, no matter how they're encoded, will depend on how they get hooked into the DNS. I mean, are both the NIS and Chinese national registries going to be recognized by the TLD servers? Will China mount its own TLD servers pointing to their native registry?
As some other posters have pointed out down below in the +1 area, current high-end sewing machines tend to be highly computerized and highly expensive. They're like special-purpose milling machines. They tend to use docking cables to laptops to handle the importation of sewing patterns, stitching patterns, whatever.
The obvious problem with this is that laptops are WAY expensive, and, let's face it, the overlap between the sewing machine crowd and the laptop crowd is not 100%.
The non-obvious problem is that sewing and stitching patterns are copyrighted, and the software on the laptops likewise. This led to some ferocious encryption stuff. The protocols spoken by the machines were highly proprietary and had to be run through printer-port dongles. It was fierce...and inconvenient.
The GameBoy solution solves so many things, it just has to be elegant. The cartridge amounts to a dongle. The GameBoy provides all the computing smarts needed - a laptop was extreme overkill in this department. Also, you get to cut down on the solid state stuff in the sewing machine itself, and take advantage of the immense economies of scale of the Gameboy, which has got to be the most immediate benefit here.
I toured Colossus (from the inside out, as I mentioned in my post on the recent declassification story), and as far as I could gather, the machine was not designed to be reconfigured in any way. It was a five-channel search engine for correlations in an input tape, typed out the correlation coefficients on a typewriter using solenoids, and that was that. No reconfiguration possible.
If you demand that a computer be programmable, I don't think Colossus qualifies. On the other hand it's one damned impressive piece of hardware, no argument there.
Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed, but his Difference Engine was. Oh, not by him, but by a dedicated crew of Brits about ten years ago. The complete mill, ready to roll (literally), is on display in the Science Museum in London.
The funny thing about this is that the machine's whole purpose was to eliminate typos in the gunnery tables prepared for the military. To that end, the mill was to connect directly to a printer, to print the tables without human intervention. Babbage's printer was not built. Instead, sensors come out of the mill. Sitting where the printer would be, on a pedestal, is...a laptop.
Words fail me to describe the crushing sense of irony I experienced when I saw this.
Actually, it's probable that Tony Sale's work on the Colossus reconstruction is one of the main reasons why this work was declassified at all. They could hardly hold onto it now that a working reconstruction is publicly available.
The Americans have wired a declassification schedule into the classification machinery; positive action has to be taken to keep things classified beyond their natural expiration date. I don't think the British have any such law, so they just tend to hang onto things long past any reasonable deadline.
Tony ran into this time and again, skirting the edges of the Official Secrets act in the course of rebuilding Colossus. The only reason he was able to complete it at all was because the folks who'd worked on this stuff in WW II were reaching the ends of their lives, and many of them decided to write their memoires and the Official Secrets Act be damned. Rather than lock up a bunch of antique war heroes turned popular authors, the British government finally started to let this stuff go. Tony's work blew the lid off thereafter.
Tony Sale, at the Museum of Cryptography at Bletchley Park, has reconstructed a running Colossus. At the time I visited, he had two out of its five parallel channels up and working (I believe all five are now complete). I asked him a couple of semi-intelligent questions, and he promptly grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into the Colossus machine room. He stood me in the middle of the frame and pointed out the machine's various sections, then ran over to the side and turned it on around me.
This was exciting on several levels, because it is very much a tube machine - lots and lots of tubes - and they all run at +400 volts plate voltage. I didn't make a whole lot of extraneous movements.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about it, visually (besides all the glowing tubes) is the high-speed paper tape reader that runs a 5-level Baudot tape over and over again in a loop as the machine searches for correlations. The reader's made of machined aluminum (or aluminium, over there), and stands about six feet high. It reads 5,000 characters per second, and the impulses from the smaller feeder holes form the machine clock.
This is an absolute don't-miss if you get to London. Bletchley Park is a fine day trip by train.
Linksys 4-port Cable/DSL routers purport to support PPoE, so you could just hook up one of these and run up to four computers behind it, running any OS you like.
ObNote: I own such a Linksys box but AT&T Broadband doesn't run PPoE over their cable modem service (yet), so I haven't tested the PPoE software in the Linksys box.
Now, this is interesting. I will have to reread the current ToS.
To those who say that PayPal is a "micro-payments" service, I say that in the cases where I've been interested in using it, the payments were far above the "micro" level.
I started out to register at PayPal, but because this was actual money we're talking about here, I took the time to read the agreement.
Bah! Feh!
If you use a credit card to pay for goods and services, you have the right to withhold payment for non-performance. The issuing bank charges back to the vendor in such cases.
You give that up with PayPal.
There's this long paragraph about reversing charges. In the event that you reverse a charge, you authorize them to turn around and re-charge your card. As many times as you reverse the charge, they'll put it back on.
Once you give money to PayPal you'll never see it again unless and until you sue them.
I agree. As far as I can tell, CTSS was probably the first "real" OS, in the sense of a software system allowing multiple programmers to use the machine without loading up the hardware from scratch for each new program run.
I would have voted for JOSS, Rand Corporation's Johnniac Open Shop System, except that a posting from Willis Ware some time back pretty firmly gave his opinion that JOSS was not a true OS. Could have fooled me, but Willis is one of the very few people I'll defer to in such matters.
There's an existence proof for this. R. Stockton Gaines developed a system called "Keyprint" at The RAND Corporation over fifteen years ago, in the days when RAND invented the MH mail system and other cool stuff (they've now assassinated all their high-tech efforts and gone in for policy analysis).
We researchers had our reservations about that one, based on many of the same concerns shown here. Imagine our surprise when the blamed thing actually worked. There were enough degrees of freedom that the aggregate of the correlations it used was immune to "off days" and other such variations. This is described in Rand Report R-2526-NSF.
I'm an unabashed Old Phart, from the CS generation previous to Rob Pike's. I read his diatribe some days ago, before it was publicized here, and it did ring a few bells. I know why he feels the way he does. I don't think the situation is as dire, or as permanent, as he paints it.
At the time Rob came to the Labs, and for some years before, the CS scene was being painted in pretty broad strokes. Minicomputers allowed the software boys to explore uncharted territory for cheap. Oh, they explored it before on mainframes, but it's hard to get a whole off-brand OS started when you need access to $3 million worth of hardware to do it. But even before then, there were lots of things out there. Most operating systems were not only crap, they were deliberately obfuscatory crap, as Ted Nelson was fond of pointing out at the time. Reacting against that we had ITS, TENEX and MULTICS on the mainframes, and on the new minis, UNIX. On more experimental hardware we had things like CM*, C.MMP, and the Culler Fried Chicken system in Santa Barbara.
The only one that survived is UNIX. It took the combined efforts of all of us just to keep ONE alternate OS alive.
Today, almost all our efforts are, as Rob points out, dedicated to extending what's already there. Yet the actual effort expended overall is huge. The scene is a LOT larger than it was./. reported a week or three ago on a whole new OS that I didn't even know existed. Then there's BeOS, and other older ones like Sprite. F'r'eaven's sake, you can buy BeOS in stores now. Do you know how long it took for just a book on UNIX to come out? And it was crap, at that.
Still, the main effort of systems research today could be characterized as "embrace and politicize." I think that's normal. I've remarked in other forums that science in general is in that sort of rut now. Most of the really big inventions of the 20th century, apart from the Internet, occurred in the first 50 years of the century.
Consider what we have to look forward to, what I think Rob wants to see:
. We should not be inventing protocols. Our applications should negotiate them as needed.
. TCP/IP is a point solution, good only across a certain range of bandwidths and error rates.
. Devices should exist in a hierarchy of protocols. The protocols spoken by backbone routers should be profoundly different from the protocols spoken by doorbells, cars, and home computers.
. Devices should not be given operating systems. They should discover and run one appropriate to their task, on their own.
. No device should have to both run a GUI and compute (Plan 9 demonstrated the feasibility of this view).
I've gotta say that if I were your upstream, and you served me with a subpoena at 3AM to handle one of your problems, I'd comply, then drop you like a hot potato.
After all, unless a law says otherwise, you don't have to do business with anyone you don't want to.
Only problem with this story, whether cDc originated it or not, is that I first heard it in 1966. The beginning of this little number has not been traced yet, folks...
This is just nuts. I saw at least three Enigmas when I was at the Bletchley Park museum of cryptography, and I read not too long ago of a cryptologist/collector here in California who has over twenty whole or partial Enigman machines. Who says there are only three???
Iridium is so entangled in an expensive mesh of settlement and orbital agreements that this effort makes me think that Edmund Blackadder's servant Baldric has just suggested, "I have a cunning plan, m'lord. Let's replace them with really, really big turnips!"
It turns out that ICO was insured against launch failure. Furthermore, they took out the policy before the recent round of launch failures, so they paid far less for insurance for all twelve of their satellites than a company would currently have to pay to insure just one - basically, they got such a deal.
Furthermore, one reason why nobody's interested in the Iridium constellation is that it can't move data, and doesn't move voice all that well - sound quality is pretty bad. ICO's satellites, while not exactly state-of-the-art, can at least move both voice and data. And at ten satellites instead of 66, their system's a lot simpler.
Result: Last I heard, McCaw is still interested in pulling ICO out of the weeds, but is not interested in Iridium any longer.
The FreeBSD culture and the BSDI culture are so close that if they can be reasonably combined within the purview of a freely licensed development effort, it looks like a good thing to me. I have the greatest respect for both Jordan Hubbard and Mike Karels, having done some small amount of work with both of them, Jordan at Walnut Creek and Mike back at Berkeley in the CSRG days. I've also been greatly impressed by David Greenman's sagacity as FreeBSD architect.
I haven't seen either Walnut Creek or BSDI, Inc. set the world on fire from a business perspective, so perhaps from that aspect alone the idea of a merger is a good one.
The whole "desktop vs. server" idea is a mare's nest. Sun doesn't scruple to support a single version of Solaris that runs on both their desktop machines and their Enterprise 10000 servers - it's a bloated pig in both places. (By the way, for sheer entertainment value, I urge any interested parties to ask Mike O'Dell about Solaris networking. I've never seen a better rant on any subject.) The choice of a "desktop OS" is, in most cases, chiefly influenced by factors which don't directly have anything to do with the OS. Linux and FreeBSD now both have creditable office suites in native ports...both suffering from the fact that neither one is Microsoft Office. (NO uSoft Office is NOT the best, but it's the one that sells corporate accounts. Win lose or draw, this is A Truth right now.) Both have reasonably good desktops available, or getting there. FreeBSD used to trounce Linux in TCP/IP stack robustness and carrying capacity. It's still better, in most trials, but the race is no longer a runaway.
Both Linux and FreeBSD have contributors who are far better at writing code than conducting themselves rationally. I had originally supposed that, over a span of about five to ten years, Linux would gradually displace FreeBSD. I am no longer certain that this is the case. I do not believe that FreeBSD will overtake Linux to any significant degree, because compared to, say, Microsoft, both operating systems have similar capabilities and make similar offerings. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux came to market first, and gained a lion's share of the market, which it will probably not lose. Many Linux proponents believe that the prevalence of Linux in the marketplace is due to the GNU license. I regard this as a religious argument. The religious fervor surrounding things GNU certainly has provided Linux with a boost, but I don't think that it is a decisive one. Apple's customers include a strong religious minority, which has helped the company, but this minority was not enough to save the company when it hit the bricks. (One strong difference between Apple and Gnu is that Apple's religious followers probably derive their fervor from the same place as the medieval church: the tendency of the Church to periodically pick a group, declare them heretics, kick them out and burn them at the stake. GNU does not do this; Apple certainly does. Apple II anyone? How about a Newton?)
The merger of BSDI and Walnut Creek CDROM bring real strengths from both. I expect the result to be the presence of BSD UNIX as a strong second choice to Linux for years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew Mike professionally for about twenty years. I visited him at BRL several times, and chatted with him at some of the early UNIX meetings. He and Doug Kingston (now at Morgan Stanley Peat Marwick or whatever they're named this week) made a teriffic team in the days when keeping a national TCP/IP net running took the cooperation of everyone involved. When the main routers were LSI-11s, you needed to know the tricks, and Mike knew them all.
He went the extra mile to help people all over, though it was no part of his job to do so. BRL didn't treat him as a sinecure and let him have his head. He put in a full day doing BRL stuff and then helped other folks around the country on his own time.
He was just an all-around great guy. One of the First has died.
Which registrar gets to register Chinese domain names, no matter how they're encoded, will depend on how they get hooked into the DNS. I mean, are both the NIS and Chinese national registries going to be recognized by the TLD servers? Will China mount its own TLD servers pointing to their native registry?
As some other posters have pointed out down below in the +1 area, current high-end sewing machines tend to be highly computerized and highly expensive. They're like special-purpose milling machines. They tend to use docking cables to laptops to handle the importation of sewing patterns, stitching patterns, whatever.
The obvious problem with this is that laptops are WAY expensive, and, let's face it, the overlap between the sewing machine crowd and the laptop crowd is not 100%.
The non-obvious problem is that sewing and stitching patterns are copyrighted, and the software on the laptops likewise. This led to some ferocious encryption stuff. The protocols spoken by the machines were highly proprietary and had to be run through printer-port dongles. It was fierce...and inconvenient.
The GameBoy solution solves so many things, it just has to be elegant. The cartridge amounts to a dongle. The GameBoy provides all the computing smarts needed - a laptop was extreme overkill in this department. Also, you get to cut down on the solid state stuff in the sewing machine itself, and take advantage of the immense economies of scale of the Gameboy, which has got to be the most immediate benefit here.
The paper tape reader on Colossus runs at 5,000 characters per second.
The feeder holes provide the machine's clock.
I have to agree with this.
I toured Colossus (from the inside out, as I mentioned in my post on the recent declassification story), and as far as I could gather, the machine was not designed to be reconfigured in any way. It was a five-channel search engine for correlations in an input tape, typed out the correlation coefficients on a typewriter using solenoids, and that was that. No reconfiguration possible.
If you demand that a computer be programmable, I don't think Colossus qualifies. On the other hand it's one damned impressive piece of hardware, no argument there.
Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed, but his Difference Engine was. Oh, not by him, but by a dedicated crew of Brits about ten years ago. The complete mill, ready to roll (literally), is on display in the Science Museum in London.
The funny thing about this is that the machine's whole purpose was to eliminate typos in the gunnery tables prepared for the military. To that end, the mill was to connect directly to a printer, to print the tables without human intervention. Babbage's printer was not built. Instead, sensors come out of the mill. Sitting where the printer would be, on a pedestal, is...a laptop.
Words fail me to describe the crushing sense of irony I experienced when I saw this.
Actually, it's probable that Tony Sale's work on the Colossus reconstruction is one of the main reasons why this work was declassified at all. They could hardly hold onto it now that a working reconstruction is publicly available.
The Americans have wired a declassification schedule into the classification machinery; positive action has to be taken to keep things classified beyond their natural expiration date. I don't think the British have any such law, so they just tend to hang onto things long past any reasonable deadline.
Tony ran into this time and again, skirting the edges of the Official Secrets act in the course of rebuilding Colossus. The only reason he was able to complete it at all was because the folks who'd worked on this stuff in WW II were reaching the ends of their lives, and many of them decided to write their memoires and the Official Secrets Act be damned. Rather than lock up a bunch of antique war heroes turned popular authors, the British government finally started to let this stuff go. Tony's work blew the lid off thereafter.
Tony Sale, at the Museum of Cryptography at Bletchley Park, has reconstructed a running Colossus. At the time I visited, he had two out of its five parallel channels up and working (I believe all five are now complete). I asked him a couple of semi-intelligent questions, and he promptly grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into the Colossus machine room. He stood me in the middle of the frame and pointed out the machine's various sections, then ran over to the side and turned it on around me.
This was exciting on several levels, because it is very much a tube machine - lots and lots of tubes - and they all run at +400 volts plate voltage. I didn't make a whole lot of extraneous movements.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about it, visually (besides all the glowing tubes) is the high-speed paper tape reader that runs a 5-level Baudot tape over and over again in a loop as the machine searches for correlations. The reader's made of machined aluminum (or aluminium, over there), and stands about six feet high. It reads 5,000 characters per second, and the impulses from the smaller feeder holes form the machine clock.
This is an absolute don't-miss if you get to London. Bletchley Park is a fine day trip by train.
Linksys 4-port Cable/DSL routers purport to support PPoE, so you could just hook up one of these and run up to four computers behind it, running any OS you like.
ObNote: I own such a Linksys box but AT&T Broadband doesn't run PPoE over their cable modem service (yet), so I haven't tested the PPoE software in the Linksys box.
Yes, this is a big change from what it was when I contemplated joining.
Good for them. Looks like a reasonable service now.
(I'm the original poster in this thread.)
Now, this is interesting. I will have to reread the current ToS.
To those who say that PayPal is a "micro-payments" service, I say that in the cases where I've been interested in using it, the payments were far above the "micro" level.
I started out to register at PayPal, but because this was actual money we're talking about here, I took the time to read the agreement.
Bah! Feh!
If you use a credit card to pay for goods and services, you have the right to withhold payment for non-performance. The issuing bank charges back to the vendor in such cases.
You give that up with PayPal.
There's this long paragraph about reversing charges. In the event that you reverse a charge, you authorize them to turn around and re-charge your card. As many times as you reverse the charge, they'll put it back on.
Once you give money to PayPal you'll never see it again unless and until you sue them.
I agree. As far as I can tell, CTSS was probably the first "real" OS, in the sense of a software system allowing multiple programmers to use the machine without loading up the hardware from scratch for each new program run.
I would have voted for JOSS, Rand Corporation's Johnniac Open Shop System, except that a posting from Willis Ware some time back pretty firmly gave his opinion that JOSS was not a true OS. Could have fooled me, but Willis is one of the very few people I'll defer to in such matters.
See my post below about R. Stockton Gaines's work at RAND around 1978-1980. You don't happen to remember your instructor's name, do you?
Would you rather that it did find it?
I think not.
There's an existence proof for this. R. Stockton Gaines developed a system called "Keyprint" at The RAND Corporation over fifteen years ago, in the days when RAND invented the MH mail system and other cool stuff (they've now assassinated all their high-tech efforts and gone in for policy analysis).
We researchers had our reservations about that one, based on many of the same concerns shown here. Imagine our surprise when the blamed thing actually worked. There were enough degrees of freedom that the aggregate of the correlations it used was immune to "off days" and other such variations. This is described in Rand Report R-2526-NSF.
I'm an unabashed Old Phart, from the CS generation previous to Rob Pike's. I read his diatribe some days ago, before it was publicized here, and it did ring a few bells. I know why he feels the way he does. I don't think the situation is as dire, or as permanent, as he paints it.
/. reported a week or three ago on a whole new OS that I didn't even know existed. Then there's BeOS, and other older ones like Sprite. F'r'eaven's sake, you can buy BeOS in stores now. Do you know how long it took for just a book on UNIX to come out? And it was crap, at that.
At the time Rob came to the Labs, and for some years before, the CS scene was being painted in pretty broad strokes. Minicomputers allowed the software boys to explore uncharted territory for cheap. Oh, they explored it before on mainframes, but it's hard to get a whole off-brand OS started when you need access to $3 million worth of hardware to do it. But even before then, there were lots of things out there. Most operating systems were not only crap, they were deliberately obfuscatory crap, as Ted Nelson was fond of pointing out at the time. Reacting against that we had ITS, TENEX and MULTICS on the mainframes, and on the new minis, UNIX. On more experimental hardware we had things like CM*, C.MMP, and the Culler Fried Chicken system in Santa Barbara.
The only one that survived is UNIX. It took the combined efforts of all of us just to keep ONE alternate OS alive.
Today, almost all our efforts are, as Rob points out, dedicated to extending what's already there. Yet the actual effort expended overall is huge. The scene is a LOT larger than it was.
Still, the main effort of systems research today could be characterized as "embrace and politicize." I think that's normal. I've remarked in other forums that science in general is in that sort of rut now. Most of the really big inventions of the 20th century, apart from the Internet, occurred in the first 50 years of the century.
Consider what we have to look forward to, what I think Rob wants to see:
. We should not be inventing protocols. Our applications should negotiate them as needed.
. TCP/IP is a point solution, good only across a certain range of bandwidths and error rates.
. Devices should exist in a hierarchy of protocols. The protocols spoken by backbone routers should be profoundly different from the protocols spoken by doorbells, cars, and home computers.
. Devices should not be given operating systems. They should discover and run one appropriate to their task, on their own.
. No device should have to both run a GUI and compute (Plan 9 demonstrated the feasibility of this view).
Broad strokes, people. Broad strokes.
I've gotta say that if I were your upstream, and you served me with a subpoena at 3AM to handle one of your problems, I'd comply, then drop you like a hot potato.
After all, unless a law says otherwise, you don't have to do business with anyone you don't want to.
Only problem with this story, whether cDc originated it
or not, is that I first heard it in 1966. The beginning
of this little number has not been traced yet, folks...
Gee, what part of "whole or partial" didn't you understand?
This is just nuts. I saw at least three Enigmas when I was at the Bletchley Park museum of cryptography, and I read not too long ago of a cryptologist/collector here in California who has over twenty whole or partial Enigman machines. Who says there are only three???
Iridium is so entangled in an expensive mesh of settlement and orbital agreements that this effort makes me think that Edmund Blackadder's servant Baldric has just suggested, "I have a cunning plan, m'lord. Let's replace them with really, really big turnips!"
I think they've invented a new element.
"Dyspepsium."
It turns out that ICO was insured against launch failure. Furthermore, they took out the policy before the recent round of launch failures, so they paid far less for insurance for all twelve of their satellites than a company would currently have to pay to insure just one - basically, they got such a deal.
Furthermore, one reason why nobody's interested in the Iridium constellation is that it can't move data, and doesn't move voice all that well - sound quality is pretty bad. ICO's satellites, while not exactly state-of-the-art, can at least move both voice and data. And at ten satellites instead of 66, their system's a lot simpler.
Result: Last I heard, McCaw is still interested in pulling ICO out of the weeds, but is not interested in Iridium any longer.
The FreeBSD culture and the BSDI culture are so close that if they can be reasonably combined within the purview of a freely licensed development effort, it looks like a good thing to me. I have the greatest respect for both Jordan Hubbard and Mike Karels, having done some small amount of work with both of them, Jordan at Walnut Creek and Mike back at Berkeley in the CSRG days. I've also been greatly impressed by David Greenman's sagacity as FreeBSD architect.
I haven't seen either Walnut Creek or BSDI, Inc. set the world on fire from a business perspective, so perhaps from that aspect alone the idea of a merger is a good one.
The whole "desktop vs. server" idea is a mare's nest. Sun doesn't scruple to support a single version of Solaris that runs on both their desktop machines and their Enterprise 10000 servers - it's a bloated pig in both places. (By the way, for sheer entertainment value, I urge any interested parties to ask Mike O'Dell about Solaris networking. I've never seen a better rant on any subject.) The choice of a "desktop OS" is, in most cases, chiefly influenced by factors which don't directly have anything to do with the OS. Linux and FreeBSD now both have creditable office suites in native ports...both suffering from the fact that neither one is Microsoft Office. (NO uSoft Office is NOT the best, but it's the one that sells corporate accounts. Win lose or draw, this is A Truth right now.) Both have reasonably good desktops available, or getting there. FreeBSD used to trounce Linux in TCP/IP stack robustness and carrying capacity. It's still better, in most trials, but the race is no longer a runaway.
Both Linux and FreeBSD have contributors who are far better at writing code than conducting themselves rationally. I had originally supposed that, over a span of about five to ten years, Linux would gradually displace FreeBSD. I am no longer certain that this is the case. I do not believe that FreeBSD will overtake Linux to any significant degree, because compared to, say, Microsoft, both operating systems have similar capabilities and make similar offerings. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux came to market first, and gained a lion's share of the market, which it will probably not lose. Many Linux proponents believe that the prevalence of Linux in the marketplace is due to the GNU license. I regard this as a religious argument. The religious fervor surrounding things GNU certainly has provided Linux with a boost, but I don't think that it is a decisive one. Apple's customers include a strong religious minority, which has helped the company, but this minority was not enough to save the company when it hit the bricks. (One strong difference between Apple and Gnu is that Apple's religious followers probably derive their fervor from the same place as the medieval church: the tendency of the Church to periodically pick a group, declare them heretics, kick them out and burn them at the stake. GNU does not do this; Apple certainly does. Apple II anyone? How about a Newton?)
The merger of BSDI and Walnut Creek CDROM bring real strengths from both. I expect the result to be the presence of BSD UNIX as a strong second choice to Linux for years to come.