[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 10:21 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: There were also a lot of gatekeepers. Perhaps not so much in CSRG, but certainly in the next tier out: if you weren't part of the in-crowd at USENIX and on USENET, it was hard to contribute. Ted has referred to this as kowtowing to the "Gods of BSD." He wasn't wrong, though I think the dynamic has changed substantially in recent years. I'm struck by the thing Ken said in the video that was linked earlier, so much of "success" has to do with luck. Unix was in the right place at the right time, spread through universities, and escaped into industry. It's one of the relatively few research projects that was truly successful in that sense. But consider that it also had something like five years to incubate in a lab before that happened, and the members of that lab had a vested interest in making it useful (after all, they were using it for their own consumption!). By the time BSD came along, Unix already had a well-defined "shape" and a certain degree of polish; contributing meant there was a bar you had to hurdle. On the other hand, Torvalds published Linux when it was still a toy, but critically, at a point where the industry was at a real inflection point, due to external factors. More capable research systems had been out there before, and open source BSDs were right around the corner, but they didn't win. I think this was mostly luck and timing. He also pretty much took from everybody, which made it much more of a "big tent" sort of thing as opposed to the faculty lunchroom vibe prevalent in the Unix world (what I've previously described as, "the old-school Unix mentality"). Periodically we see how this still rankles some, even on this mailing list. But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance" thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that effort. And there's definitely an in-group. Meanwhile, the BSDs seem a lot more accepting; maybe that's just me. At least FreeBSD and DragonFly appear that way. Anyway, it seems fair to say that Linux seems mostly beholden to the interests of big companies these days. Linus is personally responsible for much of Linux's success, but I think he will also be the thing that causes Linux's demise, though indirectly. He's as much of a cult of personality as he is a technical leader; when he's gone (and in the limit we're all mortal) who will step into his shoes? Then again, maybe I'm wrong: I thought this would happen when Jobs died, but Cook seems to have stepped into the role nicely and Apple's doing just fine. Steve Jobs chose wisely; perhaps Linus will as well. - Dan C.