[geeks] The best things in the world

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> I saw no sign of them taking off.  I never heard of any BSD for the PC
> (although I certainly had heard of BSD in general) until long after I
> was using linux.  That suggests to me that BSD was for some reason
> incapable of really cementing unix on the PC as a viable alternative to
> Windows.

I heard about 386BSD and Coherent before I heard about Linux.  Anecdotal
evidence is unreliable in either direction.

> Solaris also isn't an outgrowth of linux.  I clearly realize that.
> Would Apple still be around if linux wasn't?

I would expect so.

> Would OS X still embrace it's unix-ish heritage if it weren't for linux?

Apple bought NeXT in early 1997, and was in talks with both Be and NeXT
long before that.  I had a Linux system at home in mid-1997 or so and all
but the most geeky folks I knew wondered why in the world I'd ever want
something like that on my desk.  Jean-Louis Gassee mentioned in several
interviews that Apple was looking to buy Be specifically for their OS
technology.  Then Apple bought NeXT, for what we can only assume was the
same reason.

Apple would have OS X without Linux.  OS X might not have been as openly-
geeky as it is, but it's hard to think it'd be substantially different.
Remember that before Apple bought NeXT, Apple had sponsored a Linux port
to the Power Macintosh.  If their development of OS X was predicated upon
the existence of Linux, why'd they keep the Mach kernel and all its
strangeness around (plus adding more tasty strangeness in the driver API)?
They could've ported AppKit & friends, as well as the window system to
Linux, and likely spending less money doing so than they did in
modernizing NeXTstep.

> Perhaps.  But I really don't think that Sun would still be around if
> linux hadn't existed, even though Solaris is clearly not descended from
> Linux.

I doubt that.  Linux never ran very well on SPARC systems, and Sun has
sold x86 computers only recently.

> Now, what gets to me is that it seems that a lot of non-RTOS embedded
> use would be much better done with *BSD, so it really irritates me that
> we aren't seeing things like Linksys devices running BSD.  I would love
> to be able to reflash linsys wrt54gl's with NetBSD or OpenBSD instead of
> linux.

It'd be nice.  I suspect it has a lot to do with familiarity.  There are
just a lot more Linux hackers, and Linux has more brand recognition, so
some project manager (like a suit) is going to say "let's embed Linux"
before he says "let's embed BSD".  There were a few appliances built
around FreeBSD; I think one was called "Whistlejet" or something like
that.

The FreeBSD kernel is -far- easier to hack on than the Linux kernel is.
It's been a while since I've done anything on the OpenBSD kernel, but my
recollection of it is that it's also a much simpler piece of software to
wrap one's brain around.

Were I to come up with a need for an appliance OS[0], the choice would be
between one of those (and OpenBSD would probably win, as FreeBSD's dynamic
device tree and pervasive multithreading adds complexity that usually
isn't needed).  Linux wouldn't even be on the table--there's just too much
stuff that needs to be placated before the system becomes usable.


[0] And I had such an OS based around OpenBSD.  It was a set of patches
     and a few shell scripts (plus a lot of my own userland tools).  Some
     changes in OpenBSD 3.8 broke my changes to the build system, and I
     never got around to fixing that, as the project I needed it for
     "lost funding"[1].
[1] This term is far weaker than it ought to be, but is more legally-
     appropriate than something that would more accurate.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |