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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!hookup!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!nntp-ucb.barrnet.net!autodesk.com!autodesk.com!greywolf From: greywolf@autodesk.com (Open Carefully -- Contents Under Pressure) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Linux vs. BSD?! Date: 7 Mar 1995 18:18:12 GMT Organization: Autodesk, Inc. Lines: 58 Message-ID: <3ji814$qc6@autodesk.autodesk.com> References: <3ira54$7vq@quandong.itd.adelaide.edu.au> <3jbrf1$vl@delos.BSDI.COM> <1995Mar5.171038.26486@wavehh.hanse.de> <3jfj9f$h9g@fido.asd.sgi.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lonewolf.ithaca.com lm@slovax.engr.sgi.com writes in <3jfj9f$h9g@fido.asd.sgi.com> /* * The SVR4 mess was a business deal between Sun & ATT, done for financial * reasons on Sun's part and conquer-the-world reasons on ATT's part. It * was, and is, a failure. Agreed. * * [ Pro-GPL statement deleted for brevity. ] * * I completely agree with this sentiment. There is no good reason that * all the talented OS hackers should be working on the same stuff that * was being worked on 10 years ago. That should have been done, been GPLed, * and the OS hackers moved on to more interesting & useful stuff. * * Has anyone considered that perhaps the reason that people don't like * a GPLed OS is that the OS hackers are scared to write applications? * It's easier to do yet another SCSI framework than it is to figure out * how to do WordPerfect. A shame, because anyone that can hack in the * kernel is almost certainly capable of doing some very nice applications. To you, perhaps, OS work is no longer (or never was) interesting. Please don't make the supposition that nobody else is more interested in systems engineering than applications engineering. I don't think that fear has all that much to do with it. Comfort, perhaps. Fascination, maybe, especially among those of us who, despite having spent a mere 11 years with UNIX, are still very much in admiration of the folks who can demolish and reconstruct the major working parts of a kernel. Me? I just do sysad (I do it well, but still...), but I consider myself a mid- to-low-grade systems engineer. So, yes, the kernel hackers are capable of doing applications, but I think that the ones who don't do applications don't do them because they are simply not interested. I'm not sure exactly why; I just can't program graphics for a damn (and it's just not interesting to me, and I find myself more repulsed by things like GUIs as we approach the decade of the EGUI[*]). It's much more interesting to me to get a machine to run UNIX than it is to build all the whizbang applications that run on PCs for X11. There are probably lots of people out there who are more capable of and more interested in achieving such a feat than I. Now let me generate sysad tools (which I don't consider to be in the same category as luser apps) and I'll go to town. * -- * --- * Larry McVoy (415) 390-1804 lm@sgi.com */ -- I'm really a software toolsmith and a musician by trade, but nobody really needs a software toolsmith much, and the music industry is so cutthroat that it would probably do me in. So I do systems administration on the side as a hobby. Funny that my hobby finds more work than either of my professions... -- Microsoft Windows NT -- "What a totally excellent discovery...NOT!" [ DISCLAIMER: The above opinions are emphatically NOT those of Autodesk, Inc. ]