20 Jan
2020
20 Jan
'20
9:51 a.m.
It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
I found all this "fragmentation" pretty hard to understand. -BSDI felt
like it had occupied the space, and I couldn't entirely understand
what was going on, or why any of it mattered.
I also reacted very badly to the public dirty linen spats around the
Jolitz's IPR, and who-did-what to-whom in woodshed, with colonel
mustard and the lead pipe.
What worried me was the loss of intellectual capital. People I liked
online, and respected, seemed to be running to the four winds. Why was
something I worked with turning to suck?
What I think I missed (didn't understand) was how draining support was
for Berkeley, and in the absence of a sugar daddy (Earth Sciences?
DOE? IBM?) and loss of contracts like the NSFNet support for BSD-rt
(they stopped using PC-Rt as a platform for routing) It was
increasingly hard for a teaching and research institution to justify
what was going on. Sun spun out of Stanford. MIT was doing the Gui
work. Compilers had gone really funny with Gnu and an income stream
had evaporated, and a lawsuit was in the offing, and people who hadn't
done full on DOTCOM boom vesting suddenly found growing old and not
having a 401k at the scale they needed to maintain a wine cellar ...
What I also missed is that it stopped innovating. People were
innovating in other places, doing things I didn't understand. I
totally did NOT get what 8th ed. and Plan9 was on. Drugs I couldn't
fathom.
Nothing lasts forever. Had you said to me "ha.. VMS is going to die,
and Dec is going to die, and Sun is going to fold into Larry Ellisons
personal empire" I'd have taken every one of those bets on what turned
out to be the loosing side.