Bringing it back around to AIX, this may be a bit of a leading question, but for those who are more in the know than not on how AIX works, is there any chance there are little design nuggets hidden down in there that now, not being critical to an active IBM project, may find their way out there into the world?
This is kinda my latent curiosity with any of these commercial systems, if there's something absolutely amazing hiding down in one of the codebases just waiting to see the light of day in some post-commerical source release that might improve the situation out there in open source UNIX-like land. Some ideal SMP scheduler, quality drivers, etc.
Of course, the usefulness of any such thing would depend on any theoretical eventual license applied to a source code release. Something restrictive would prevent proliferation of a good idea, but in any case, there are so many lineages just ripe for plundering, and as time goes on, it becomes more likely those source codes will actually be accessible and licensed to allow that. Who knows though...
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
The era of general-purpose computers won't end.
The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things. Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from. Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings. Some will be done by enthusiasts. But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?