I too have worked with Linus, and agree with the good programmer and good architect.
I think he managed the project well for quite a while, but never quite recovered from the
GNU incursions.

As far as stability and portability is concerned, GNU is a disaster. Even when a feature is
the same across different architectures the option names and values are often different.
In one company I worked for we had two releases nearly derailed because of Linux/GCC
issues. In one case, the way locales worked was different between different versions of
Linux. In another case, GCC simply silently removed an option that we depended on and we
nearly shipped a product that would have bombed out if the user had already upgraded
to the newest GCC.

In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the widow managers on Linux are getting more
bizarre by the year. Hitting a key at random by mistake can cause windows to disappear,
screens of unknown utility to appear, everything to disappear, etc. Setting options to try to
achieve some kind of consistency is totally different in each system. Etc. etc. There seems
to be no larger organizing principle at work...

----- Original Message -----
From:
"Larry McVoy" <lm@mcvoy.com>

To:
"Joerg Schilling" <schily@schily.net>
Cc:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:24:57 -0800
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

Oh brother.

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 07:14:44PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Linus had the qualities of being a good programmer, a good architect,
> > and a good manager. I've never seen all 3 in a person before or since.
>
> My memory is different. He claims that his intention is to keep
> kernel/userspace interfaces stable, but given the fact that this did never
> happen, I tend to believe that he lacks the understanding on what all is part
> of the kernel/userspace interface.

So you're taking on the guy who won the Unix wars, has stayed in charge for
a couple of decades, created the OS that runs on 498 of 500 super computers,
the OS that runs on more phones than apple's phones, tablets, and computers
combined?

I've worked with Linus, I know him pretty well. I stand by my description
above and nothing you've said has changed (and isn't likely to).

As for interfaces, huh. I've got two decades of supporting a commercial
product that uses file system, networking, VM interfaces and I can't
remember a time were we had to change something because Linux broke
an API.