Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mel.aone.net.au!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.inc.net!newspump.sol.net!newsfeeder.sdsu.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!saturn!larryr From: larryr@saturn.sdsu.edu (Larry Riedel) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Getting off the stick [was Re: TCP latency] Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Date: 19 Jul 1996 23:26:28 GMT Organization: San Diego State University Lines: 80 Message-ID: <4sp5j4$3lg@hole.sdsu.edu> References: <4paedl$4bm@engnews2.eng.sun.com> <4s8rtp$jsh@fido.asd.sgi.com> <4sej3e$155@dworkin.wustl.edu> <4seo88$fqd@fido.asd.sgi.com> <4sesh4$2ls@dworkin.wustl.edu> <31EDBDA2.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: saturn.sdsu.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] The paradigm shift I would like to see is that it should be the goal of developers of free software to create software which has real value to them, and there is no reason to think this value can be directly or immediately measured or recognized by anyone other than the <1% of computer users who are technically astute. I have been in the software industry for about fifteen years, and most of what I thought had real value eventually became largely successful - things I take so much for granted now like SMTP and NFS and TCP/IP, C and C++, FTP, the GNU tools like GCC, emacs, and bash, DNS, BSD Unix extensions; (mostly) open architectures like SCSI, ISA, PCI, etc. Maybe these things were not the best solutions, but they worked, and once we had them, we could use them to move forward until we have something better. There are so many things that I worried were going to go away because companies like Micro$oft and Novell and IBM and DEC supposedly had so much money and influence. But it seems to me that the stuff I thought had the most value wound up succeeding more so than the inferior stuff those companies were pushing. If I look back ten years and think about what the big companies who had the almighty "market share" would have be the way things are now, and I look at the way things really are now, it is pretty obvious to me it was not they who technologically brought us here - it was the people who provided real value by coming up with solutions to the obvious challenges they wanted to overcome, not by trying to make money off the mass market. The people with whom I am familiar who have been responsible for creating the real value I am talking about never intended to have their success measured in dollars, or the number of novice users of their software, or the opinions of the hoi polloi, but instead by whether or not they and their peers believed they had created real value. If no spreadsheet, word processor, personal information Manager, CAD system, MIDI sequencer, animation or desktop publishing package ever is written for FreeBSD, I think that should be fine . Is that really what people on the leading edge of software development want to spend their time writing? I don't think so. If 99% of the computer users in the world think FreeBSD is far too complex to install and use then I think that should be fine. Those people are not the ones creating the value in the software industry. Why can't FreeBSD just be the OS for the people creating the value, instead of everything for everyone? I used to feel good about the BSD community because the people in it seemed to be less interested in whether or not the number of people who used their software was more than some other OS, and relatively oblivious to whether or not the uninitiated could easily install, configure, and use the software - if was easy enough for the developers, that was what mattered, because what the developers created had value and if the uninitated wanted access to that value, they would make the effort to figure out how to get at it - it was never very difficult To me the measure of success for FreeBSD should not be whether or not it has more novice users, more foaming-at-the-mouth zealot appeal, more third-party application software support, more name recognition, more hardware support, or better benchmark numbers. To me the measure of success for FreeBSD should be whether or not the best developers think it is the best platform on which and for which to develop software which has real value to them. I don't think the fight is in the OS arena or what sits on top - I think the fight is against technical challenges which, when solved, will advance the leading edge of software. Those solutions will be easily portable to all extant Unix-like OSes. The recognition of their value by technically astute developers will bring about an effort to use the solutions for whatever purpose they are effective, such as making money. I think there is a set of software for the demands of the Market, and a set of software for the needs of the developers. I wish a lot less energy in the Unix area were spent worrying about the former, because I think the best technical minds are in the Unix arena, and I think it is a waste of their time to worry about the immediate demands of the Market which are much less technically challenging and whose solutions' value is so much more evanescent. Larry