Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensing 480
An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")
This is getting old (Score:4, Funny)
I've thought they've ended this flame war several years ago?
Well then, here we go, let the flaming commence...
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Is BSD wasn't into that trouble, IBM and pretty much everybody else would take it for themselves and never give anything back to the community. For as much as I don't like to admit it, it was the gnu license which lead us here.
Re:This is getting old (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, *BSD was taking off and the Linux devs made liberal use of the FUD that resulted from the lawsuit to scare people off of *BSD. Linux itself, by Linus' own admission, probably wouldn't exist if he had had a copy before he started Linux.
The GPL itself has its utility but in all honesty, let's be honest about the effect that had on developers early on that weren't just hobbyists. The BSD license is one of the main reasons that the internet was able to grow so quickly despite MS not having a viable TCP/IP stack for its OS until late. That never would or could have happened with the GPL just because of the way it's written.
Re:This is getting old (Score:4, Insightful)
In my own case, Linux was simply the first Unix that supported the hardware I had at the time.
And the BSD lawsuit delaying the distribution of the i386 versions of BSD by a few years had nothing to do with that...
Re:This is getting old (Score:4, Funny)
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Honesty? From the GP post:
It is Microsoft that (effectively) offered a free operating system to the proles. More accurately, they force every desktop user who buys a PC to buy their OS, and if they want to use something else it is additional effort. So the "proles" use Windows because
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Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these
Desktops are a not the only sort of computer platform, though they are the most difficult for a newcomer to penetrate. People want every piece or hardware and software from the past ten years to just work. It's really difficult to do unless you have OEM's and dev's in on the process, and that's really hard to do unless people already have a lot of desktops with the OS (chicken and egg problem).Though Linux has surely though slowly been doing this.
When it comes to embedded systems, supercomputers or serv
Re: One again IBM..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should linux target the consumer market? Leave it to Apple and Android devs to develop computer appliances for the mass market. Linux is for people that take computing seriously. Not to say that that's all it's good for or that's all its users are interested in, but if you don't have an ideological chip on your shoulder and aren't interested in the command line, you're probably better off just using whatever came on the box you bought. Until Apple, there was no interest from the Unix community in the consumer segment, and the degree of consumer that consumer OSs enjoy is inversely related to their Unix components.
There's a lot of people I would recommend linux to, and many tasks for which it is an (arguably) superior option. Freedom from viruses is worth a great deal to me, as someone who has spent years repairing fucked up Windows systems. But I'm not eager for that particular advantage to erode, and I've dealt with far too many windows-using idiots to wish that upon the linux community.
Re:BSD far more common via Mac OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
I've thought they've ended this flame war several years ago?
Several years ago when BSD based Mac OS X took over the Unix desktop market? ;-)
I think things are a little more complicated than in the 1990s with respect to BSD vs Linux.
People who buy into the "OSX is BSD" idea need to look a little more closely. Of course OSX has BSD code in it; all modern OSes do (even Windows). However, the XNU kernel [wikipedia.org] is very different from the kernels of modern BSDs like FreeBSD and OpenBSD. While containing some BSD code it is also based on Mach and its own device driver framework. While OSX borrows BSD userspace components (like almost all modern OSes) it also depends on GNU ones, most importantly the development tools. The biggest way OSX differs from BSDs is in all the components the user sees, including the window system and GUI libraries; those are proprietary and can't be found in any non-Apple OS.
Though somewhat subjective, I think the typical modern BSD system has more in common with the typical modern GNU/Linux system than with OSX, especially if considering desktop use. Though all three contain code from BSD and GNU origins, only BSDs and Linux-based systems use traditional Unix-style monolithic kernels and X11 as the windowing system.
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"With its UNIX foundation, OS X can run many UNIX tools and environments, including X11. Available for every Mac, X11 allows you to run applications using the X Window System graphical user interface. It provides a complete X Window System implementation based on open source software and includes a suite of standard X11 display server software, client libraries, dev
Re:BSD far more common via Mac OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
Mac OSX is effectively BSD, though - the proof of the pudding and all that is that when I'm writing system software tools on my OSX machine, to port them to OpenBSD or NetBSD, I simply have to run "make". However, to port to Linux there's usually one or two small #ifdefs I have to add to get it to work (and of course, for Windows generally quite a lot more). While it might not be a BSD kernel, it feels like a family member of BSD when writing system tools.
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MacOS is Unix at only a very crude and rudimentary level. From the point of view of anyone that actually works with multiple Unixen on a regular basis, it's really nothing like Unix. Beyond the bits that it needs to conform to for "certification" purposes, it diverges from all other Unixen quite quickly.
That guy claiming to be a "BSD sysadmin" is on crack.
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If MacOS were really a Unix, then iMovie would not care whether my video came directly from the camera or if it took a trip on another platform first.
The fact that MacOS is built on top of a Unix does not make it Unix.
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No, not really. Its Darwin core is as much a BSD variant as FreeBSD is. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "based on."
Don't forget that Mach OS was originally designed specifically as a BSD with Mach as a replacement kernel.
Wikipedia: "Mac OS X is based upon the Mach kernel.[13] Certain parts from FreeBSD's and NetBSD's implementation of Unix were incorporated in NeXTSTEP, the core of Mac OS X.
Re:BSD far more common via Mac OS X (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who has tried to treat MacOS as "just another Unix", I say that you are no BSD sysadmin at all.
Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow,
he couldn't have pushed the "Linux succeeded because BSD had legal troubles" thing any harder
What was that? Three mentions of it?
I don't personally agree, I think Linux succeeded on it's own merit, but anyhow
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Funny)
He comes off as a super-asshole in general. "I published a paper in 1978 on something very close to the Java Virtual Machine, but we never got much credit for it although we were years ahead of Sun. Such is life sometimes." Too bad it was just a paper. But the truth is that Smalltalk is the language which actually existed which deserves the credit that Java got technically, but it also went nowhere because it was neither packaged more marketed attractively. The state of documentation for Squeak is distressing. So, Java it is!
Tanenbaum is clearly grumpy about continually being asked questions about why Linux ate Minix's lunch, and he's very defensive of his stupid license choices which have kept Minix an "also-ran". Maybe if they couldn't get a rise out of him, people would stop asking him about it. As long as he says stupid quotable things about Linux the questions will keep coming.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Insightful)
Tanenbaum has always been the kind of person with good technical insights, but no sense whatsoever about what makes something successful as a product or "in the real world." I have a lot of sympathy for that, because I'm like that as well. I'm a researcher - I write papers, they have good technical insights and contributions, they definitely impact the science of the field, and I hope that along the line they can affect practice - but I know there's a world of difference between what I do and making a product. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to get that.
And as far as the Java bit, yeah a LOT of people had that idea. It long predates what Tanenbaum did, back to o-code in the 1960's and p-code in the early 1970's (with the most popular version, remarkably similar to the Java/JVM model being UCSD's Pascal/pSystem). Those didn't take off like Java either - because there's a huge difference between having a good technical idea and having a successful product. Some is timing, some is "cool factor", some is marketing and sheer determination and drive. But superior technology, or having the first idea technically, has very little to do with it. See the success of MS-DOS or Windows for further examples... :-)
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Insightful)
First, on the Linux vs Minix piece - Minix wasn't ready for any use at all or at least so it was perceived. So Linux won that one. Regarding BSD, Linux ran on current hardware that hobbyists had laying around, BSD generally required a level of effort above and beyond that, so despite being a much better system, Linux won there also. Quite honestly, BSD is just a much better designed system, but that's not going to help it win outright converts when Linux appears to meet the needs and has mindshare. However, BSD may yet make a come back. I don't think the final chapter has been written yet. There's all those Windows machines that can be converted, after all. ;)
On the Java piece - Java took off because it actually worked for the things people needed. It had the libraries, so even though Smalltalk might be better designed, it fails to meet those goals for 90+% of the folks that needed something. Java was truly the first to deliver adequate functionality and performance across platforms, and people (and companies) embraced it for it came with a license and was backed by a company that everyone felt they could tolerate and trust. So far, neither's been violated. We'll see what happens now that Oracle is in charge.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Smalltalk failed do to bad marketing? This is a fallacy of the highest order. Languages become popular because they solve real problems. What problems did Smalltalk solve?
Smalltalk is unmaintainable for teams - Java is highly maintainable over a long period of time.
Smalltalk has no goal to be cross-platform - Java does.
Smalltalk has no standard for math, memory or treading - Java does.
Real world solutions sell a language. Not academic "pure oop" nonsense.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Informative)
Smalltalk has no goal to be cross-platform - Java does.
I can't speak to the rest of your opinions, but you're outright wrong about this. The current implementation of Smalltalk is Squeak, and Squeak is cross-platform, implements a virtual machine which is ostensibly the same across platforms just as Java is ostensibly the same across platforms, et cetera.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Informative)
The question is not why Linux succeeded, but why Minix failed.
The answer is simple, Tanenbaum refused to develop a 386 version,
claiming bizarrely that there were so many 286's in the world
that people would always use them.
If he had brought out a 386 version of Minix
I doubt if Linux would have taken off.
My impression at the time was that he got bored with Minix,
and wanted to move on to other things.
But the way in which Minix has been written out of the Linux story
is very strange, in my opinion.
In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix.
Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything,
but that was just because Tanenbaum had a veto
on Minix development, and only allowed a tiny handful
of devotees to add code.
Torvalds was infinitely better at getting a team
to co-operate with him.
That was the secret of his success.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Insightful)
And to get it, you had to buy a book that cost more than I paid for a used car that year. (Yes, I did buy the book too!)
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Funny)
It was not meant to be a sueable system.
Is that a Freudian typo?
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Informative)
In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix.
Oh come on. How many people still believe this Ken Brown nonsense? Even Tanenbaum himself said this is complete nonsense [cs.vu.nl].
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Informative)
"The question is not why Linux succeeded, but why Minix failed."
Well.. then I would one to question where exactly Minix failed.
It was not intended as a hobbyist system, it was not even intended to be usable and Tanenbaum even explicitly stated so, so it's no wonder it did became neither usable nor a hobbyist system.
On the other hand, Minix was intended as an educational tool to learn the basics of an OS. For this it should remain simple and true to its intention. Well, I think Linus himself said to have learned quite a bit from Minix as a lot of other engineers too, so again, how exactly did Minix fail?
"In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix."
True, only for the little fact of being false.
"Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything,
but that was just because Tanenbaum had a veto
on Minix development"
Admittedly Tanenbaum restricted Minix license out of his own reasons but Linus did *not* "rewrote" Minix because of the license; he *wrote* Linux from scratch for the pleasure of doing it, because he was a hacker and he had a shinny new 386 on his desk.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. That's called a clone or a re-implementation, not a fork. A fork is based on the original project's source code. Since Linus wrote everything from scratch, it wasn't not a fork.
IMO, Linux was successful where Minx & *BSD were not, for three main reasons:
- Linus himself - makes a near-ideal benevolent dictator for his project
- The GPL - guaranteed other devs that their work would always be Free Software
- Support for 386 and later 486 chips - a major itch that needed scratching
There were numerous secondary reasons too, but IMO the above are the main ones. In order of importance
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Informative)
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Read the current article, then the one linked to another interview with Linus. It will become clear.
Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not the same thing. Torvalds is saying Linux likely would not have existed. That doesn't mean the success of Linux is correlated to the temporarily hamstrung BSD, that simply means Linux may not have had an opportunity to succeed if BSD was not hamstrung because it would not have existed.
It may very well be that Linux would not have experienced the success that it has if BSD was not legally hamstrung but you are drawing an incorrect conclusion from Torvalds' statement.
If BSD was not hamstrung and Torvalds still decided to start the Linux project it still may have succeeded. The decision on whether or not to start the project only determined whether Linux would exist in the first place.
Linus' comment applies to many early devs (Score:4, Interesting)
Linus Torvalds himself says the same thing - that if it weren't for the BDSI lawsuits, he would have just used BSD.
That is not the same thing. Torvalds is saying Linux likely would not have existed. That doesn't mean the success of Linux is correlated to the temporarily hamstrung BSD, that simply means Linux may not have had an opportunity to succeed if BSD was not hamstrung because it would not have existed.
No, the most enthusiastic Linux developer and hobbyist is saying he would have spent his time somewhere else if BSD were available. Other early developers would have had similar behaviors. The pool of people willing to work on Linux would have been severely diminished. In other words, there would not have been a vacuum for Linux to fill.
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*UMPOSSIBLE* - Stallman announced such a project a couple of decades ago, then couldn't find anyone willing to contribute code to it.
How can a project be a success if it's never even started? So no, not total nonsense, as even Torvalds says
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Amusing Tannenbaum 1992 quote: Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5. [google.com]
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Hey, there's a gnu idea I've never hurd before. . . . :)
hawk
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Re:Frozen, I tells you (Score:5, Funny)
Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T at a crucial time.
Having lived thru that, I'd disagree. BSD was way too elitist, "oh, you wanna run a BSD flavor on a 386? Oh how cute, but you suck. We all use PDP11s here. We'll let you try, if you promise not to pester us with bug reports and things, now here's a nickel kid, go buy youself a real computer like a VAX.". Minix wanted you to buy a book and the hardware support was kinda limited so its unclear if you'd be wasting your money or not, which in the pre-amazon days meant finding out the ISBN and pestering an intimidating bookstore clerk to order it for you and then rolling the dice once it arrived. Linux? That was just some downloads off the local BBSes and/or early internet provider link, and everyone was mostly friendly most of the time, unlike the *BSD guys.
The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity. (Score:3, Informative)
The *BSD community has been painted as being "elitist" for well over 20 years now. But that's just not the case. It's a merely a community that's built around a meritocracy. They don't care who you are, or where you're from, or what your experience is, just as long as you have skill. That's all they ask for, and that's actually quite reasonable. That's why the *BSD operating systems are so damn solid; they're built by very talented developers who know exactly what they're doing.
Those who call them "elitist"
Re:The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
It requires the same amount of effort to politely redirect someone to the appropriate place, without mistreating the "ignorant". They are ignorant, because they don't know, they are trying to learn, but instead of being helpful, you turn to being abusive? I wouldn't call someone like that elitist, I'd simply call them an asshole.
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Back in 90-smth I used to be a Debian user. I used to ask a lot on Usenet and lists. That's because the system was so bad, and the documentation so shitty (Linux users back them used to use the "LDP" - Linux Documentation Project - which in effect was a bunch of badly written and outdated documents.
Then some dude from a Debian LUG (I helped begin, BTW) talked greatly about the virtues of FreeBSD. I never looked back. Right he was, indeed. Soo much better than Debian. I actually felt a sort of relief. You do
Re:The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
My experience with BSD development is that it comprises core teams of fairly smart geeks with tireless sycophants on the sidelines taken under the wings of the elders on the basis of their ability to suck up. This is why everything BSD beyond the kernel and a few specific userland apps is an also-ran.
And the BSD operating systems are "so damn solid" only in the sense that many parts are very mature and the pace of development is fairly slow, lagging well behind Linux for a good decade. This is not to say that stability isn't sometimes a good choice - which is why many people choose Debian.
Linux, meanwhile, is much more meritocratic. Your code good enough? We'll take it, even though we're not sure who you are. Big business wanting to contribute time, money and resources? We'll take it. Not up to scratch? We'll give you advice but we won't include you in anything mainline. Hell, we'll not only give you advice but we'll point you to the copious amount of documentation produced to help kernel and userland developers.
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
Re:The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
I have to say your right on the money with that statement. One of the things that made Linux so attractive was Linus et el put a lot of effort in allowing people to add driver support for hardware. It stands to reason making an OS for machines people slap together themselves you need to be able to quickly add support for a multitude of hardware. This alone is a huge reason for the success of Linux. The BSD developers on the other hand, had a clear idea of what hardware they wanted to support -- big ass servers -- so the means to support "oh look a new graphics card" type new hardware was low priority and never built in.
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Right... That was why head-to-head benchmarks of Linux and FreeBSD on SMP and file-system performance showed FreeBSD coming out ahead pretty consistently. These days, people have stopped caring about a little performance one way or the other, but it's utterly ridiculous to claim FreeBSD lags "a good decade" behind Linux.
Re:The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity (Score:4, Interesting)
For a complete counter example, try USB support. Now that was a nightmare...
Re:The BSD community just doesn't accept stupidity (Score:4, Informative)
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad.
Not "bad", but so elitist and cliquish that they fell way behind Linux for reasons other than "lawyers". Easier to blame that gang of non-techies over there rather than cleaning up your own house, isn't it?
to cobble together an OS
Don't let your bias shout too loudly. Also, why the disdain for groups which actually try to build an OS for the applications rather than for the benefit of their own ego? MS knows who they need to cater to and so does Linus.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers.
You're missing the point entirely. Linux kernel developers have made it much easier than BSD developers for others to write drivers - whether "the vast majority of manufacturers" or interested third parties. There's still the problem of API stability vs Windows but this is more an engineering decision (GPL v2 allows for a community to keep things agile rather than relying on legacy bloat) than a personality one (BSD's "if you aren't already core or protege then you should be able to divine from the source what counts as part of the stable public API and any changes we make, so fuck you!").
This argument is academic: the different philosophies and the resultant success of Linux have been played out magnificently over the past two decades. BSD is where it is only through inertia and a few first class isolated projects (e.g. openssh).
Most Linux wifi drivers NOT from BSD (Score:5, Informative)
To the best of my knowledge, the ath5k/madwifi drivers are the only Linux drivers to be ported from the BSDs (OpenBSD/FreeBSD) to Linux. Which other drivers out of the 56 Linux wifi drivers [linuxwireless.org] were ported from the BSDs to qualify the "large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux" statement?
Linux has had its own 802.11 stack called mac802.11 since the 2.6.22 kernel four years ago [kernelnewbies.org] which was developed by Devicescape. The only driver I know of that carried a (Net)BSD 802.11 stack over to Linux was madwifi which had net802.11, was never mainline and was superseded by ath5k... The madwifi driver never went mainline, nor did its net802.11 stack. Why do you think that the 802.11 stack from a BSD needs copying into a Linux driver when mac802.11 exists?
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The *BSD community has been painted as being "elitist" for well over 20 years now. But that's just not the case. It's a merely a community that's built around a meritocracy. They don't care who you are, or where you're from, or what your experience is, just as long as you have skill.
I got in an argument with Theo the Rat about the performance hit of Position Independent Executables on x86. Spoiler: It's 1%, however you get a 5% boost by -fomit-stack-pointer--which doesn't work with -fPIE -fPIC, so you take a 6% hit. Most processes spend less than 0.1% in the main executable process, and so the 6% hit becomes 0.006%. The exception is X11 itself, which at the time spent a whopping 8% of its time in the main executable, making the 6% hit a 0.48% hit.
When I posted the opening argume
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Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Having also lived through this....
Remember, that prior to Minix, Linux or any of the x86 BSDs, the idea of a personal, affordable, up-to-date Unix platform was something of a Holy Grail. The basic options were either expensive (SCO XENIX), loosely compatible (Coherent, PC-Unix) or discontinued surplus (AT&T UnixPC). The stage was set for somebody to take over the world.
In the beginning, you had two choices for running BSD on a 386- BSD/386 or 386BSD. BSD/386 was an expensive commercial product. 386BSD was free, but initially flawed and slow to release updates. It was a project basically under the control of a single person, William Jolitz, and his wife.
Quoting from the Wikipedia entry for 386BSD:
"After the release of 386BSD 0.1, a group of users began collecting bug fixes and enhancements, releasing them as an unofficial patchkit. Due to differences of opinion between the Jolitzes and the patchkit maintainers over the future direction and release schedule of 386BSD, the maintainers of the patchkit founded the FreeBSD project in 1993 to continue their work.[2] Around the same time, the NetBSD project was founded by a different group of 386BSD users, with the aim of unifying 386BSD with other strands of BSD development into one multi-platform system. Both projects continue to this day."
In this case, the issue was not elitism so much as vested self-interest. (The Jolitzes has various ties to Dr. Dobbs Journal and the original 386BSD porting effort was documented in a series of articles.
The AT&T lawsuits did occur at this time, but is has been noted that 386BSD was never party to any of them.
My personal feeling is that the success of Linux was a combination of timing, personality and community response. Had Linus taken a more controlling stance (not a benevolent dictator), things might have gone very different.
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BSD/386 was an expensive commercial product
I distinctly recall seeing a featurelist / marketing PR material around '93 or '94 and I got all excited and ready to buy until I saw the $995 pricetag. No not $899 or $999 or $1000, exactly $995. On the other hand I could have gone 386BSD but then spent $995 on the rather narrow compatible hardware list, I remember my desktop would not have been able to boot 386BSD at that time, but maybe I could have hacked it into working. In the end I downloaded a set of linux SLS floppy disk sets from a local BBS wh
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Probably because those reasons aren't so obvious.
At the time, Linux was technically behind BSD and other open source *nix OS's and had a GPL license.
Perhaps Linus was just for more succesful in gathering developers around him and it had nothing to do with the product itself?
Perhaps I'm missing the obvious reasons you are refering to?
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Linux was the new "cool" thing, and it also lacked some annoying BSD-isms that were really a pain in the butt for the SystemV people - even if those weren't in any way critical to the functionality.
And Minix at the time was also under a license that limited it's spreading so when Linux came along with a "free copy for everyone" style it was almost like Stallman's wet dream realized.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux was the new "cool" thing, and it also lacked some annoying BSD-isms that were really a pain in the butt for the SystemV people - even if those weren't in any way critical to the functionality.
You've been able to run the GNU userland tools on BSD for a long time, much as SunOS5 included the BSD userland from SunOS4 to keep the BSD-heads happy.
The truth is that it was actually easier to install Linux! If you compared Slackware to the BSD of its day, you hardly had to know anything to install Linux, less than you had to know to install DOS actually since it would actually find your network card and already had a driver. You did have to know more than you had to know to install Windows to get the GUI going, though :)
As you say, Minix had a restrictive license. But BSD also had an inferior license to Linux from the standpoint of those who wanted their changes to remain free. And today, Linux towers over the Free BSDs, though not over BSD in general thanks to Apple... where the license is not friendly. That suggests at least to me that there are considerations other than licenses that are important to users, so I suggest that Minix has problems OTHER than the licenses... and so does (did) *BSD.
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This is a troll, right? filling up root and crashing is not a feature, it's a bug, and it's one shared by most Unixlikes. We stop viruses from spreading with capabilities-based security. Well, we should. Mostly we don't. OSX has capabilities now but they mostly don't use them. Linux has had capabilities for forever now and we still don't use them. I'd be shocked and amazed if FreeBSD doesn't have capabilities.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that Linux succeeded because early Linux users were enthusiastic and evangelistic. In that time between 92 and 96, I don't think I saw anyone singing BSD's praises except hardcore sysadmin types. Whatever system usability advantages Linux had was because of its fanatical user base.
Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux was behind, but generally expressed a more practical set of sensibilities that caused the relevant bits to catch up and pass BSD a bit quickly.
All of them sucked on driver support, but I seem to recall Linux tending to getting more drivers more quickly than BSD. Some of the quality was less than stellar, but there was a willingness to go with something that mostly worked and refine it in the larger community. This sort of approach was pretty well required to work as a software platform running without the cooperation of the hardware platform you are on.
GPL may have scared off companies in the beginning and maybe even a few to this day, but the value of companies that would reject GPL and embrace BSD is rather low to the community. GPL forced the companies that *did* use it to contribute back. BSD-only companies felt any and all work they did was theirs and theirs alone and BSD upstream didn't benefit. Over time, it's snowballed and most successful companies cannot ignore the benefits of Linux. It may be common sense now that their is lower maintenance cost of submitting it upstream even if not required by license, but had GPL never made waves, the 'keep your code to yourself or else' mindset may have persisted.
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GPL forced the companies that *did* use it to contribute back.
Only if they distribute it. In house only mods don't have to be contributed back which would make it as secure for BSD.
All the software development I've done for pay has been for internal use and not distribution - yes if you're writing something for shipping you'd need to release the source but that's not as common as most people think. Tanenbaum makes the same error/assumption as well, possibly deliberately, maybe not...
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And still is, but we are all using Linux now because, well, we are all using Linux now.
See tagline below ...
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Informative)
Because Tanenbaum has hated Linus and Linux for twenty years. He and his supporters started no small number of flamewars in their day with all sorts of obnoxious claims, especially after Linus poo-pooed on the idea of microkernels.
But it's all pretty irrelevant now. The fact remains that guys like me picked up Linux in those early years in no small part because everyone looked on Minix as a toy and BSD didn't have the hardware support to allow it to run on almost all 386 and 486 machines you could pick up, from IBMs to home-built jobs. Not only that, but when hardware came out that was problematic, there were guys out there who would literally write up a device driver in a few days or weeks. There was, and still is, very much a "make it work" attitude out there.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, for only $995 at least in early '94. Complete non-starter. Its like asking why IBM zOS isn't taking over the world of computing today...
Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensi (Score:5, Interesting)
The reasons may also be more to do with Linux and the way it was run! Early hackers have noted that they preferred BSD, but could not use it due to lack of dual booting, this would have meant deleting windows which may have been needed for work. It was also easier for aspiring hackers to contribute to Linux, you didn't have to be one of the inner circle to contribute. There was also a lack of politics, persons within the rival operating systems had noted and open differences which would have affected work.
Re:Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Lice (Score:5, Informative)
In 1992, the ability to put Linux on its own partitiion and have it coexist with DOS on a single physical drive was the *ENTIRE* reason why I originally decided to go with Linux instead of 386BSD, which was also freely available at the time, even though BSD offered considerably more functionality than Linux during that period.
It had absolutely squat to do with lawsuits.
Re:Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Lice (Score:5, Informative)
When you came to BSD in 1996 you were five years late to the party, since 386BSD came out in 1991, and didn't support FDISK labels, preventing users from dual-booting. Indeed, early versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD, both of which grew from 386BSD, shared this lack. Linux used fdisk from the start (Linus not seeing a need for eight confusingly-identified partitions) which permitted dual-booting if you had partition slots free.
So you're being elitist, but ironically, not elitist enough to know what you are talking about.
Re: (Score:3)
Linux doesn't insist on anything.
Unless you are some clueless granny who only ever clicks on the OK button, you really have no excuse for a Linux installer not doing exactly what you want.
Re: (Score:3)
Linux would insist upon using a large number of partitions.
That is a steamingly incredible crock of shit, since:
(a) partition decisions are the purview of the installer, not the kernel, and
(b) even back in the day you could install everything on / . It just wasn't recommended due to the small size of HDDs.
Re: (Score:3)
You don't install everything on / because you want it to be static and non-changing so a crash doesn't take it out due to corruption and you have a bootable partition with your recovery utilities on it.
You want / to be small so it gets checked and mounted quickly.
You don't put everything on / because all activity anywhere on the disk can easily corrupt the entire partition (well, theories and all that). You also take advantage of partitioning to ensure things like logging silly errors from cron doesn't fil
Re: (Score:3)
The point is that, contrary to hedwards' delusions, Linux does not insist on large number of partitions.
How many partitions, and for what purpose, is left to the "sysadmin".
Thanks! (Score:5, Interesting)
What a tool. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure he knows more about operating system design than I will ever even want to know, but he knows jack shit about why Linux succeeded and it has nothing to do with lawsuits against BSDi, which in turn has nothing to do with BSD-4.4-lite, upon which all free *BSDs are based (and so is OSX, for that matter, although it may still retain code from BSD-4.3 for all I know, via NeXTStep.)
Linux succeeded because of the GPL, plain and simple. It had less than a year's start before 386BSD, which was not affected by the lawsuit [wikipedia.org].
Tanenbaum will say anything to make himself sound like less of a douche for placing such strident restrictions on Minix and thus killing it, and so he wants to take anything away from Linux that he possibly can. If he has to ignore history to do so, so be it. Thankfully there's Wikipedia.
(sigh, another reply to self) (Score:2)
Let me be clear, the *BSDs WERE based on 386BSD which is why it's relevant, and they therefore still are (sort of) but they've inherited code from 4.4-BSD-lite since.
What a tool to you too (Score:5, Interesting)
In hindsight, perhaps, this is all clear. At the time, would you have bet your house on the proposition of 386BSD remaining unscathed if the BSDi lawsuit had come to a different outcome? But wait, I have a reference.
From Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution [oreilly.com]:
Yeah, totally clear how 386BSD was free and clear of the legal fog of war. And a huge debt owed by everyone to Marshall Kirk McKusick and friends who fought this battle on our behalf while Linux thrived under the legal radar.
In my own view, Linux had a crazy-making anthill culture, which appealed to many young coders with more energy than brains. But you know, I wouldn't bet against energy in retrospect. The annual ipchains rewrite boggled my mind. Not my cup of tea. An even crazier splinter group made hay with PHP, breaking just about every rule of thoughtfulness and elegance known to God and man. And look where that got them: pretty damn far.
I would personally, however, have jumped on the BSD wagon at the time had it been able to promote a coherent vision of life after lawsuit. What would be the balance be now if BSD had gathered twice as many elitist greybeards into the fold? I have a feeling it would have continued to lag in the department of crappy consumer product device drivers, compromising a major defection path from Windows 98. Greybeards don't do popularity worth a damn.
Debian zealots notwithstanding, Linux quickly became popular enough to become a willing host for binary blobs.
Re: (Score:3)
What blows me away is that Tanenbaum still fosters this old chip on his shoulder, and is still invoking every possible inanity to support it.
Andrew, get over it. Minix was and still is a toy, and BSD was too much of any ivory tower for the group of hobbiests looking to replace their Amigas, Atari STs and all the other 1980s hardware that was dying off by the early 1990s.
Denial... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand how one can say BSDI suit could do anything much for Linux. The suit did not preclude the creation of FreeBSD/NetBSD and thus Linux and BSD both had opportunity. If the claim is that BSDI lent some sort of credibility/support, during that time Linux had none of that either (Red Hat didn't even technically have an offering until 94, and I would say it wasn't worth taking seriously until '97 or so).
Whatever went 'right' for Linux and 'wrong' for BSD had nothing to do with that suit.
Linus is right on about microkernels (Score:5, Insightful)
Try doing a simple modification to the MINIX kernel like adding a new system call. The new system call doesn't even have to do anything interesting or touch hardware: just add some numbers and return them, for the sake of argument or something. Last I tried in MINIX this required touching something like 6 or 7 different files in the source. There are a lot of different components in the kernel that need to know about the new system call, which component it gets forwarded to, how to package up the message to send to that server. I think Linus is bang on when he says microkernels add complexity on to the interactions between components, which is where the worst of the complexity was to begin with.
Linux does run every component of the kernel in the same address space, which has its downsides (a buggy video driver can theoretically affect your network driver), but I haven't seen these downsides come up in practice. Truth be told, if one of your drivers crashes, there's little hope of maintaining a useful system and you'll likely want to reboot anyway.
As far as AST's assertion that Linux is "spaghetti" code, no no no, look at the code for yourself. The components in Linux are very well separated. Linux keeps them separated by coding discipline rather than by some technical enforcement (like different address spaces), but this discipline is kept up very well. I suspect the high-level Linux developers (like Linus) spend a lot of time and effort tracking people down and yelling at them for breaking this discipline and trying to put in some spaghetti, but in my dealings with the kernel, they've done a very good job of staying disciplined. I haven't come across anything in the Linux kernel that I'd call "spaghetti".
Back to the example of adding a system call, I think in Linux this requires 3 source files that need to change. I've only spent a few weeks on each of them, but in my experiences, Linux has the edge on MINIX when it comes down to keeping components logically separated. In Linux, what you do in one place, no other code ever needs to know about that. In MINIX, you have to worry about how and where to forward messages and, while it is sort of elegant in its design, but I don't see an actual benefit coming out of it.
Re: (Score:3)
Why would you be modifying the kernel/adding a system call? The kernel, in this case, is just a kernel.
Re:Linus is right on about microkernels (Score:5, Informative)
Except this isn't true of microkernel systems like Minix. And this is the point: microkernels enforce protection boundaries between components so failure and recovery become feasible. That simply isn't possible in a monolithic kernel without resorting to proof-carrying code of some sort.
Re: (Score:3)
And this is the point: microkernels enforce protection boundaries between components so failure and recovery become feasible.
But still takes a heck of a lot of work. If your video driver dies, something has to recover its state when you restart it, which is far from a trivial task.
Shockingly, I read TFA, and Tanenbaum is explicitly asked if he can restore drivers for stateful devices, and the answer is no, but we're working on it. Well no shit, everyone is working on it, but no one has it working. And without this magical ability, as you say, it's only going to help you in a percentage of situations. I propose that most of these situations are situations you should never be in anyway — they arose due to a bug in the driver (or server or whatever you might like to call it) and y
Re:Linus is right on about microkernels (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as AST's assertion that Linux is "spaghetti" code, no no no, look at the code for yourself. The components in Linux are very well separated. Linux keeps them separated by coding discipline rather than by some technical enforcement (like different address spaces), but this discipline is kept up very well.
Here is a link [kerneltrap.org] to a good example of of such discipline. It contains excerpts from a discussion on the lkml over the use of "goto" in Linux kernel code. The kernel devs have found a situation where the judicious use of "goto" makes the code cleaner, clearer, and easier to maintain. The wisdom of this use is challenged by someone who dogmatically believes that all goto statements are evil. It is quite amusing (and a little sad).
Tannenbaum is right about licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
The license is really less important than community in making a project successful. What is important is a high pace of development and a large developer community, not whether a project uses the BSD or GPL licenses. In these cases, economically most commercial players will contribute most of their changes back.
Re: (Score:3)
The license is really less important than community in making a project successful.
The license helps determine what kind of community you will attract; is it people who want to help everyone, or people who want to help themselves first and anyone else only as an unintended consequence? As it turns out, the kind of people who want to help everyone have produced a more popular system, in spite of the supposedly increased improved commercial appeal of the other one.
Re: (Score:3)
Not only does IBM contribute to FreeBSD, but you also have projects like PostgreSQL where some of the main contributing forms are also selling proprietary versions of the software. Why do they both contribute and deliver proprietary versions? Because they want to use other companies' contributions too, and they don't want ALL the maintenance to fall on their shoulders.
In general the result is that companies like EnterpriseDB, Green Plum, etc, end upcontributing most of what the community would even want b
A true academic OS (Score:3)
Download Minix and you get a microkernel OS. Browsing the FTP site for packages and I see SSH, X, Vim, the make suite and Perl. It seems any actual useful programs are left as an exercise to the student.
Loads of education fun -- if I was stuck on a rocket to Jupiter and had a few years to kill reinventing the wheel. In Perl, none-the-less. *shudder*
Why so harsh? (Score:2, Interesting)
No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T at a crucial time. That's just dumb luck. Also, success is relative. I run a political website that ordinary people read. On that site statistics show that about 5% is Linux, 30% is Macintosh (which is BSD inside) and the rest is Windows. These are ordinary people, not computer geeks. I don't think of 5% as that big a success story. [AST]
I'm still convinced that it's one of those ideas that sounds nice on paper, but ends up being a failure in practice, because in real life the real complexity is in the interactions, not in the individual modules. And microkernels strive to make the modules more independent, making the interactions more indirect and complicated. The separation essentially ends up also cutting a lot of obvious and direct communication channels. [LBT]
Maybe the webserver itself is running Linux, though. As well as your home broadband router, prof. Tanenbaum!
I'm sad because of the short sight.
Linux is successfull (no quotes). This is a fact. Also Windows is (used to be) successful at some time.
Do you see Windows everywhere? Nope. Do you see Linux everywhere. Nope as well, but it's very, very popular.
Maybe it's not popular in desktops. But it is, indeed.
With the computing power available today, wasting a bunch of cycles in safer communication for microkern
Marketing (Score:2)
All the cool kids started wearing Tux t-shirts. Linus Torvalds did interviews with the press, and it didn't hurt that he's somewhat photogenic. Wired Magazine said you weren't hip unless you ran Red Hat and had a frame relay connection to your house.
And then the startups in the 1990s didn't want to (or just couldn't) spend money on SUN boxes, so they found a "good enough" solution.
A few choice quotes from Theo de Raadt (Score:5, Interesting)
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
Yes, people have mentioned a million times how much BSD has done for OS X. What has OS X done for BSD? On the desktop it's fallen off the map, it used to be listed at 0.01% at hitslink now it's nothing. Nobody uses just BSD and I strongly doubt anyone using OS X contributes much to BSD so that the next version of OS X will be better. That I think would have happened with or without Linux. At least on the server side there's a few using BSD as-is, perhaps we'd have a BAMP stack instead of a LAMP stack. But without all the corporate contributions I'd probably be more of a Win/Unix market with BSD as a simplistic, free server.
BSD depends on people and corporations that are willing to give, give and then give some more. Would Linux be where it is if everybody has constantly grabbed features to put in AIX, SCO (before they turned troll), Solaris, OS/2, MacOS, Windows and so on? No. The BSD license lacks the self-preservation to exist as an independent product, sure the code won't go away but all the users disappear on proprietary spin-offs and so too in essence all the potential developers. With or without Linux it'd end up just as libraries for products people actually use. Then you can pound your chest and say our BSD code is in the TCP/IP stack of Windows, while Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.
Re:A few choice quotes from Theo de Raadt (Score:4, Insightful)
Has it occurred to you that some people don't share your view that everyone should be forced to use their code in a way consistent with Stallman's ideologies?
(As an aside: Apple has actually done a fair bit -- but since you're borderline trolling I wouldn't expect you to mention that.)
And yes, I do use FreeBSD exclusively on everything but my laptop. Who gives a shit if it's not listed on some popularity-ranking website? There were plenty of doofuses saying the same thing about Linux when it started, and Mac OS X back in 2001.
The BSD license allows people to use code for pretty much whatever purpose, provided that they don't claim to have written it. The GPL allows people to use code for whatever purpose -- provided they conform to the GPL ideology, license their code under the GPL, and don't use it in certain ways that Stallman et al. think are unacceptable.
You tell me which embodies the spirit of freedom more.
Re:A few choice quotes from Theo de Raadt (Score:5, Insightful)
That's irrelevant to his point of software dominance via natural selection. His point was simply that the GPL is a better survivor given software market dynamics and the human mindset, and that's why it's thrived more than BSD. Nobody cares what license you choose, but it's undeniable that the GPL is more successful.
Re: (Score:3)
While the other license has proven to enable an explosion in applications and devices from an array of corporations and individuals (...)
Do you mean Microsoft? That's the only corporation with an "explosion in applications".
See, that's the problem with Linux fanboys - you gotta stick your heads out of your own asses sometimes and just check out what the competition is doing...You might be surprised...
Now, I'm kinda of a Unix minor geek myself, but Microsoft has some cool shit that's years ahead of Linux, su
Re:A few choice quotes from Theo de Raadt (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't? If I wasn't required to use Linux at work, I'd be 100% FreeBSD, no Linux, no Windows, nothing. FreeBSD remains a far superior desktop system. Linux remains a nightmarish fight to get a system stable and with the software you want installed. Load up RHEL5/6 with all the repos you want, and it's still completely hit or miss as to whether the program you've been using for decades will be in any of the repos. So go get the source RPM and cross your fingers and hope... Ever tried to compile OpenSuSe SRPMs on RHEL? Yikes!
In FreeBSD, there's a port (and probably a package if not for license issues) for everything you could ever want to have installed. And if it's older and was since deleted, you can probably pull it in from an old ports tree, and it'll still work just fine.
One simple little thing ALL the BSDs get right, that ALL the Linux distros (except Slackware) get wrong... Headers (-devel) included in the package, not separately. They're tiny, they'll never cause any problems, and almost everyone will end up needing them at some point, so it's incomprehensible that they're universally shunned...
Linux and GNU aren't dependant on companies and developers just doing the bare minimum to comply with the GPL. No, they have to go above and beyond that, to working with the community to get their changes merged. Apple's tar dumps of WebKit source code were useless, yet this is the license you were saying was going to keep them honest? Sorry, no, it was public pressure that got them playing nice, NOT license obligations.
There are many examples of non-CopyLeft licenses working out fine, and furthermore, being NECESSARY.
Theo is complaining, because he personally burned a lot of bridges, and I'm not sure companies want to be associated with him at all. FreeBSD is doing just fine and developing quite well, even if it gets vastly less press than Linux. Jimmy Wales is begging for money every day, does that mean Wikipedia, like BSD, is a failed idea, and it needs a copyright that requires contributions to Wikimedia for all commercial redistribution?
There are plenty of examples of BSD/MITX licensed software being NECESSARY. Pretty much EVERYTHING that is a de-facto internet standard was released as BSD/MITX-licensed software, and I'd say next to nothing released as CopyLeft has ever risen to that level...
OpenSSH wouldn't have caught-on if it was GPL'd. Why do you think FreSSH has negligible installed base? Telnet and rsh stayed in-use far after they should have died out, yet it wasn't until OpenSSH came along that everyone agreed on a standard.
Apache has done quite well, both in funding and code contributions, despite their very free license across their projects.
The same is true of BIND and SENDMAIL.
NFS (v3) was looking horribly decrepit for a number of years. Yet it kept being used, while all the GPL'd network filesystems being developed without the drawbacks and features like encryption died on the vine. And now with NFSv4, the freer option is back up to snuff, and all those CopyLeft alternatives remain dead.
rsync is a great service, but will it ever be established as an alternative to primitive FTP file transfers? It actually looks like SFTP is taking over a lot of those functions.
NTP? LPD? Kerberos & LDP? iSCSI?
Go ahead, just name one piece of CopyLeft software that has gone on to become a defacto internet standard, and prove me wrong.
The moral of the story is, you want to say if it was BSD instead of Linux, it would have been "stolen" and locked-up in proprietary products. I'd say if it had been BSD instead of Linux, penetration would have been VASTLY faster, and COMPLETE. Sure, th
Lame lawsuit excuse (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux kernel started in 1991. Lawsuit started in 1992 and settled in 1993. Linux kernel 1.0.0 was released in 1994.
Good to know that mature BSD was no match to Linux v.1.0.0.
Tanenbaum does harp on, rather.... (Score:2, Interesting)
You'd think he's sore because Linux took his ball away.
Surely not? :-)
One of the main reasons Minix crashed and burned was the difficulty in getting the bloody thing. I have a copy of his book "Operating Systems, Design and Implementation", published by Prentice Hall INternational Editions in 1987. I bought a copy in 1990 as I was interested in Unix like operating systems. The prices listed for the Minix software at the end of the preface were out of date even then, Prentice Hall in the UK wanted about
You Never Really Heard About BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years later I heard somewhere (May have been Wired) about this spiffy new Linux operating system. By then I had a (more or less) stable internet connection and the instructions were quite easy; download 20-some-odd slakware diskettes from Sunsite and you were in business. Nothing was mentioned about BSD. So I downloaded 20-some-odd diskettes from Sunsite and I was in business.
At least in my case, Linux won out over BSD largely due to marketing and the easy distribution method. No one every really talked about BSD, and Linux worked brilliantly for me, so I used Linux.
GNU/Linux won because it works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
"Because it has achived suffient market share hardware companies are now supporting it better and more people are able to work on hardware support."
That's of course a point of view.
But I remember the unix wars and to me it was quite obvious even back then that IBM, Sun, HP and SGI (the main contenders I knew back then) fighting for their market share were idiotic when their main problem in the years to come was going to be the PC and the Microsoft thingie. I was innocent enough to think that SCO, aiming as
As one who lived through it... (Score:5, Informative)
I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.
Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).
Re:Tanenbaum? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing doesn't exclude the other.
And both Linux and Minix has their merits, but Linux has one big advantage and that is that it has so many drivers that it did overtake Windows a while ago. You may find cases where you miss a driver for Linux for your pet device but it's starting to get unusual unless it's a very new device.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you are confused with "O, Tannenbaum" - note the double "n", which is the song translated as "O, Christmas tree".
Re:There's no debate. The GPL doesn't promote free (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no debate any longer. It's quite clear that BSD-style licenses promote freedom, while the GPL goes out of its way to remove freedom.
That kind of depends who you are and whose freedoms you're concerned with, actually. GPL promotes certain types of freedom, where BSD goes with the idea that "freedom" means "no restrictions whatsoever". I dont think theres a clear cut "this one is more free" because both are certainly correct uses of the word "freedom".
The GPL license is all about limiting the freedom of people to do what they want with the software.
Come on, you know better than this. The GPL compromises the freedoms of future developers in order to guarentee that the end user at LEAST has the freedom to modify and redistribute.
Wikipedia sums it up well:
The distribution rights granted by the GPL for modified versions of the work are not unconditional. When someone distributes a GPL'd work plus his/her own modifications, the requirements for distributing the whole work cannot be any greater than the requirements that are in the GPL.
In a stricter sense BSD IS about maximizing freedom in the sense of anarchy; but US' society was formed with the idea that in order to maximize individual freedoms when groups are involved, you need to do so by setting restrictions (Bill of Rights, enforcing contract law, enforcing theft laws, etc). You lose some freedoms (the ability for a congressperson to vote on a speech law, the ability for you to take Bob's lunch) in order to gain a more stable, guarenteed level of freedom (being secure in your home, being able to agree to an enforceable contract, being guarenteed the right to political speech).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL license is all about limiting the freedom of people to do what they want with the software.
Incompetent, cowardly troll is incompetent and cowardly; The GPL license is about limiting the freedom of programmers to do what they want with your copyrighted source code, specifically for the opposite of the purpose which you state; it is indeed there to prevent people from placing limits on what users may do with the software.
Try harder, weedhopper.