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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!zombie.ncsc.mil!paladin.american.edu!news.jhu.edu!aplcenmp!netnews.jhuapl.edu!uunet!in2.uu.net!van-bc!vanbc.wimsey.com!cynic.portal.ca!curt From: curt@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Why isn't NetBSD popular? Date: 25 Aug 1995 17:44:01 GMT Organization: Internet Portal Services, Ltd. Lines: 102 Message-ID: <41l252$fia@wolfe.wimsey.com> References: <41j8ek$gq2@wolfe.wimsey.com> <41ki0u$7lr@news.belwue.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: cynic.portal.ca Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:890 comp.unix.bsd.misc:196 comp.os.linux.advocacy:18733 In article <41ki0u$7lr@news.belwue.de>, Markus Baeurle <s671687@rghx50.gp.fht-esslingen.de> wrote: >Why not go and write a letter to the editor? Hopefully they'll print it. As a matter of fact, I did. :-) In a brief reply they thanked me for allowing them to print it if they wished. I don't know how much, if any, of it will be printed, however, as my letter is nearly three times their two hundred word limit. The letter is appended. cjs -- Curt Sampson curt@portal.ca Info at http://www.portal.ca/ Internet Portal Services, Inc. Vancouver, BC (604) 257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil. ------------------- Subject: August 1995 Issue of _Computer_ To: m.potes@computer.org Date: Thu, 24 Aug 1995 18:56:38 -0700 (PDT) Cc: lewis@cs.nps.navy.mil, shahid@icase.edu Dear Sir, I'm writing to express my disappointment with an article and a column in the August 1995 issue of _Computer_. Bokhari's article, `The Linux Operating System,' shows no sign of historical perspective and not much indication of familiarity with current research realities. Having a very inexepnsive or freely available advanced operating system with a large set of tools is without a doubt an incredible boon to the academic research and teaching community. As a matter of fact, this has been widely available at low cost to the academic community for well over a decade now as the BSD Unix distribution by Berkeley. (The Net/2 portion of that has been available to everyone, academic or not, for free.) A version free to anyone, with most portions under a licence less restrictive than that of Linux, has been available on the Intel 386 platform since Jolitz released his port of the Net/2 code, 386BSD. NetBSD and FreeBSD are two products descended from 386BSD (and, since its release, incorporating much of the 4.4BSD-Lite code) currently freely available to everyone. NetBSD has been ported to many, many other platforms, often replacing the original OS on older systems that still work (and are still useful for teaching and some research) but no longer have support from their Vendors, such as the Sun 3 and the DECStation. BSD is a much more popular platform for research than Linux is. It has for long been the focus of research code for networking on the Internet. The code itself eventually appears under Linux (Linux's networking, though not of the same quality as that of any of the BSD systems, was derived from Net2), and I'm sure that current research products, such as LFS, will appear there too once they have been proved practical under BSD. It thus strikes me as odd that someone would propose Linux as a university research and teaching platform without even a comparison for suitability with a BSD system, and it strikes me as at best misleading not to present even a brief historical overview of closely related freely available research systems. This is not the sort of thing I expect of the publishers of _The Annals of Historical Computing_. I would also like to make a much briefer comment about Ted Lewis's entirely uncritical "Binary Critic" column. This blithe dismissal of other operating systems is at best naive. The dismissal of Novell Netware aproaches ludicrousness. Peer-to-peer networking is hardly likely to replace dedicated file servers in any corporate environment, and statments such as "Security issues have been thought out too" hardly present a convincing argument that Windows 95 has solved any security problems, much less any of the many other technical problems facing administrators of large networkings. Technical considerations aside, having worked for the IS department of a large multinational corporation I can say that one does not easily toss out the systems currently serving ten thousand or more users. Changing even the workstation operating systems is a large and very expensive endeavour. Mr. Lewis seems to be suggesting that it's going to be trivial to replace an entire networking and data storage infrastructure. I cannot say that I am convinced that the benefits of Windows 95 are so great that they are guaranteed to save even a substantial fraction of the costs of such a switchover in all cases. You may publish either this entire letter or such portions as you see fit. cjs -- Curt Sampson curt@portal.ca Info at http://www.portal.ca/ Internet Portal Services, Inc. Vancouver, BC (604) 257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil. ------------------- -- Curt Sampson curt@portal.ca Info at http://www.portal.ca/ Internet Portal Services, Inc. Vancouver, BC (604) 257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.