*BSD News Article 10288


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From: md@sco.COM (Michael Davidson)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:24:09 GMT
Message-ID: <1993Jan22.212409.1225@sco.com>
References: <C0yK27.9Ly@csn.org> <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com> <BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com> <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com> <1jq0q3INNook@slab.mtholyoke.edu>
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jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) writes:

>In article <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:

>>From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
>>advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest.

>You don't think that UCB has advanced the state of the art of Unix?
>I'm not going to even comment on this, because I can't imagine that
>there's a single other reader of these newsgroups who would agree
>with you.

*cough*

Then I'm afraid you don't have much imagination .... (and perhaps you also
don't read very carefully).

What John *said* was that the parties in question "had not advanced the
art" and what you countered with was the assertion that UCB had "advanced
the state of the art of UNIX". I took John's comment to be referring to
the state of the art of software engineering as a whole, not just to
UNIX (although I think that a case could be made for that point of view
even if the domain under consideration *was* restricted to UNIX).
The fact that you *assumed* that he was just referring to UNIX is,
I suspect, a symptom of the very problem to which he was referring.

(oh, and by the way, I do tend to agree with him on this particular point)

UNIX was and is a great operating system - that's one of the reasons
why it has lasted so long, but it's days are (or should be) numbered
if we are going to amke any real progress. Ironically I believe that
the original designers of UNIX are far more aware of this than some of
it's more recent disciples. There used to be an adage that "real" UNIX
was what ran on Dennis Ritchie's machine - perhaps that's still true ;-)