on Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 04:56:35PM -0700, Meyer Wolfsheim (wolf@priori.net) wrote:
On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:
Summer, June/July, IIRC. I've done a couple of look-ups since. There's been little additional news or information (I'm not saying none, I'm saying little). OpenBSD, a relatively little-known free 'nix, gets rather more press and community coverage.
Little-known? That's unfair. OpenBSD is a fairly well known operating system, among the members of its target audience.
I'll leave grasping the concept of "relative mindshare" as an exercise to the reader. I use and admin an oBSD box myself.
Poor licensing choices are one of several key modes of failure for free software projects. If Plan 9 precedes forward, I expect to see another two or three significant licensing revisions.
Explain the popularity of Unix, then.
I think Unix is an exemplar of my points, for its heyday. Again, "relative" is a core concept. I couldn't do much better than Kernighan and Pike in _The UNIX Programming Environment_, Chapter 10, Epilog, written in 1984: The UNIX operating system is well over ten years old, but the number of computers running it is growing faster than ever. For a system designed with no marketing goals or even intentions, it has been singularly successful.... The main reason for its commercial success is probably its portability -- the feature that everything but small parts of the the compilers and kernel runs unchanged on any computer.... But the UNIX system was popular long before it was of commercial significance... The 1974 CACM paper by Ritchie and Thompson generated interest in the academic community....Through the mid-1970s UNIX knowledge spread by word of mouth: although the system came unsupported and without guarantee, the people who used it were enthusiastic enough to convince others to try it too.... Why did it become popular in the first place? ...[I]t was designed and built by a small number (two) of exceptionally talented people, whose sole purpose was to create an environment that would be convenient for program development, and who had the freedom to pursue that ideal.... In that early system were packed a number of inventive applications of computer science, including stream processing (pipes), regular expressions, language theory...and more specific instances like the algorithms in diff.... The UNIX system has since become one of the computer market's standard operating system, and with market dominance has come responsibility and the need for "features" provided by competing systems. As a result, the kernel has grown in size by a factor of 10 in the past decade.... [A]lthough UNIX has begun to show some signs of middle age, it's still viable and still gaining in popularity. And that popularity can be traced to the clear thinking of a few people in 1969.... Although they didn't expect their system to spread to tens of thousands of computers, a generation of programmers is glad that it did. This reads very much like a history of GNU/Linux, a similarity that struck me at some of the recent Linux10 celebrations and preparations. Change a few names and dates, and change user share to millions rather than thousands, and you're about on-base. What K&P don't get into is the licensing terms of the first Unix systems. AT&T was enjoined by its ongoing anti-trust restrictions (originating in 1911) which prohibited it from selling computer systems (1949, 1956 agreements). This meant that Unix was largely freely distributable among computer systems of the day in the standard format for data interchange: research computers on university and corporate campuses, via magtape. It rose to dominance on the thousands of such systems in existence from 1975 to 1985. This didn't change until 1985 and the final anti-trust settlement and breakup of AT&T, at which point bitter battles for control greatly hampered the Unix market, with impacts felt to this day in the *BSD / GNU/Linux split. Unix's success was based on its portability, liberal distribution terms, practical applications, "building blocks" architecture, extensibility, and continued viability with growth in size and popularity. Note that today, the comparative advantage along many of these dimensions lies with GNU/Linux. Again, it's highly portable, licensing is more liberal than proprietary Unices (with an ideological and pragmatic scuffle between the BSDs and Linux on licensing terms and adoption), the core "small, simple, does one thing" applications philosophy largely persists. Note that GNU/Linux is now growing in market and mindshare, at a cost to both UNIX and alternative server systems, particularly at the small end of the scale. See Christensen's _The Innovator's Dilemma_ for a general illustration of principles. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html