4 Jun
2022
4 Jun
'22
7:46 a.m.
To bring the topic back to some relevance to SIMH:
Does it _matter_ that we’ve ended up with a handful of Linux variants (RH, Ubuntu, etc,
plus Android) and BSD derivatives (macOS, iOS, etc) dominating the Unix world?
If xBSD has some great idea, it’ll get wedged into Linux (one can argue about the elegance
of course) and the Apple *OS as soon as it proves beneficial to enough users. If one
out-performs the other, you can bet someone will track it down and fix it.
Even Windows is adopting Unix/Linux concepts now.
If the kernel.org tree is both the source of many distro variants and the sink for many
successful ideas, I can only hope OpenSIMH has similar success.
Vive la différence!
d
On 4 Jun 2022, at 11:05, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 06:10:46PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
Says you. I was running it in at least 1995.
So in all of this, the thing that keeps getting missed is Linux won.
And it didn't win because of the lawsuit, it didn't get crushed by the
GPL that all the BSD people hate so much, it won on merits. And it
won because there was one Linux kernel. You could, and I have many,
many times, just clone the latest kernel and compile and install on
any distribution. It worked. The same was never true for all the BSD
variants. Tell me about the times you cloned the OpenBSD kernel and
it worked on FreeBSD. I'm maybe sure there was maybe one point in time
where that worked but then for all the other points in time it didn't.
Like I said, I built and supported a very complex application on all the
Linux platforms, all architectures, also supported on *BSD, HP-UX, AIX,
IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, etc, windows{xp,2000,2008,etc}, MacOS.
The problems I had between the various BSDs were orders of magnitude
bigger than the problems I had between the various Linux distros we
supported.
I will admit that we cloned NetBSD's stdio library because we needed
to make changes to it (we stacked CRC, XOR, gzip, lz4, etc on it).
So we side stepped any stdio issues but for the rest we just made it
work.
So my actual data trumps your opinion on this one. The BSD splintered
enough that they might as well have been IRIX and HP-UX, they weren't
as crazy as AIX, I think AIX wins crazy, but they were dramatically
more different, in subtle and annoying ways, than any Linux distro was.
My whole point is that if BSD had a focus, either a dictator or a
steering committee that people like me would have followed, it would
have won. It lost. It sucks that it did, I'm a BSD guy in my core,
but BSD lost. And it lost because of a failure in leadership.
You and the other BSD people don't like that message but it is what it
is. BSD lost because Linux had better leadership.
On Fri,
Jun 3, 2022, 5:48 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 04:52:52PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
No. 386BSD died before then. > The problem is there was
{386,Net,Free,Open,DragonFly}BSD where there
> should have just been "BSD". One, not a bunch.
>
Except from 1993-1996 there were only two of those BSDs. NetBSD and
FreeBSD
forked in 1993 due to the inability of the
patchkit to adequately cover
the
problems
in 386BSD governance.
Um, so there were 3: 386, Net and Free. That's already 2 too many. Sure,
there are forks, but there is one tree that matters, and that is
Linus' tree. You can't say that about BSD and that is the problem in
it's entirety. If I want to change BSD, which one?
By your standards, only FreeBSD matters... so that's easy.. but you already
said Redhat is all that matters... and that kernel differs somewhat from
Linus'. Ditto if you are dealing with Android... it's not just one Linux
and never has been.