21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
6:24 p.m.
jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:
|So there is a question here, though, and I'm curious to see what others who
|were closer to the action think. Why _did_ Linux succeed, and not a Unix
|derivative? (Is there any work which looks at this question? Some Linux
|history? If not, there should be.)
Likely this can at least in parts be explained with human
behaviour and social movement. It was new, it was fresh, the
early postings of Linus Torvalds give a clear impression that he
wants to get out and rise and get this thing done. His thing was
completely baggage-free (means something, just listen [1]) and
everybody was welcome to take part and make this something
one can be prowd of. Or nearby that.
And it has grown a very, very large codebase. Just yesterday:
?0[steffen@wales ]$ sysctl hw.ncpu
sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/hw/ncpu: No such file or directory
Then again i wildly guess and find this is to be a GNU problem.
And: you don't have to write a good documentation, or any at all.
I will _never_ forget once i came from SUSE, then RedHat and
Halloween Linux to FreeBSD the first time, with all that grown
infrastructure, also that in /usr/share/doc and /usr/share/misc,
that was nothing but an enlightenment to me. Plan9 i didn't know
at all until three or so years ago, there you also have nice
documentation (and if you include doc.cat-v.org)
You are a student, you have no girl friend, you don't have much
money, saturday nights are long and boring, and there you can get
something really great going, can be creative and get some
self-fulfilment, and communicate with others all over the world
which all pull together. That is pretty cool -- and the result
really was, too, even before IBM and such spent billions of
dollars to improve it even further. About, i don't know, 16 or so
years later?, Linux is still free software, and it has not be torn
in pieces due to all the interests: i think that really is a great
achievement, and likely that the person Linus Torvalds is not
innocent at it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45OhGdzcEFk
--steffen