11 Mar
2003
11 Mar
'03
3:52 a.m.
Well, the impression I got from IBM re: AIX and Linux's relationship, was that
they were going to give AIX a Linux makeover so that they could maintain an
apparently unified Un*xish shop - as far as AIX and Linux _are_ Un*ces, that
is!
How that gets interpreted as importing Un*x trade secrets into Linux, I have
no idea.
I also thought IBM was going to allow some of their mainframe high
availability ideas to influence Linux - not through direct porting of the
code - VM/ESA is apparently written in PL/I, and I doubt that most Linux
programmers would touch that with a barge-pole. And a waldo at a workplace
on a planet on the other side of the galaxy. Or universe.
I myself wanted to get some information on the internal structure - ie, the
part that gets passed between the SFS client and the Reusable Kernel Server -
of the VM/ESA Shared File System way back when, and was told in no uncertain
terms, not to bother trying.
I don't see SCO has much chance of doing anything except causing a bit of
unwelcome disruption and - I hope - getting bought out at bargain basement
prices by IBM and getting the entire Un*x source tree BSDed or LGPLed to stop
all this useless nonsense at the "source". Or at the "sauce", to give
it a
rather appropriate spin.
Wesley Parish
On Tuesday 11 March 2003 12:45 pm, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
<snip>
I am very sure that IBM has not put any UNIX code into Linux. For one
thing, it's not their style, and in fact they keep the AIX and Linux
people very separate. Last year I wrote a clone of AIX's JFS file
system on Linux for IBM. This is the old JFS, not the JFS they
released under GPL. I was not allowed to see the AIX source code, for
exactly the reasons of the complaint. The only information I had were
the header files they distribute with the development system.
The AIX code wouldn't have helped, anyway. Linux is not UNIX, as
anybody who's done kernel programming in both knows. I had thought
that this childish superstition about the holiness of source code
would have been stamped out at the end of the last UNIX wars.
Greg
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."