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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!nntp.crl.com!pacbell.com!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!parc!dunvegan!macleod From: macleod@adoc.xerox.com (Peter MacLeod) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD... Date: 26 Jul 1995 15:20:27 GMT Organization: Xerox Desktop Document Systems, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 39 Message-ID: <3v5mfr$jv4@news.parc.xerox.com> References: <DC6vJ3.L53@news.central.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: dunvegan.adoc.xerox.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com wrote: [etc] : If this happens I couldn't be more pleased. Looking back on the history of : Unix I can only point to a few good things that ever came out of commercial : vendors dicking around with it. The vast majority of good things in Unix : today came out of universitys, mainly grad students, not to mention the : enjoyable names as well. Can you imagine a commercial vendor naming a : program "lint" for example? This is a naive view of history. "lint" came out of Bell Labs, and was sold as part of AT&T's Unix pretty early on. Many of the most important ideas in computing of the last 25 years have come out of research arms of commercial entities, e.g. Bell Labs for UNIX, C, etc., Xerox PARC for the GUI, the Mouse, the laser printer, etc. It is interesting to notice that in the case of Unix, the UC Berkeley work, certainly the most important effort in the development of UNIX after the original work by Thomson & Ritchie et. al. at Bell Labs, was mostly IMHO to "finish" the system, make it into a usable large-scale operating system, with coherent networking, VM, high-performance file systems, etc. Such work is, well, a lot of work, and a lot of it was well done, but, for example, designing a new filesystem doesn't necessarily consititute a "great advance in operating systems." : The next great advances in operating systems will originate in the academic : community, and be refined by commercial entities. That is how it always : has been and how it always will be. So what if these ideas are brought : from Unix into a commercial OS? Some people do the ground-breaking things, some people do the incremental work that make things useful to others. Both kinds of people exist in both the academic and commercial sectors, and both kinds of of people are necessary. --P