[geeks] The best things in the world

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 04:29:37PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>I heard about 386BSD and Coherent before I heard about Linux.  Anecdotal
>evidence is unreliable in either direction.

It depended upon where you were. If you were in a CS department at
a university, you heard about Linux. If you were out in the "real world",
you heard about Xenix, x86 UNIX, Coherent and BSD.

What kept "real" UNIX out of the home was AT&T's $60 a workstation,
$250 a server license.

>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.

The also tried to develop an OS8 based upon UNIX with IBM, remember
Taligent? When that fell apart they tried to port Linux to the PPC using
a modified Mach kernel (MKLinux).

What IMHO killed that idea was the GPL. IMHO it is the worst possible
open source software license, as it puts the burden of distributing
the source code to modifiers. Obviously some people love it, but
that's not really what this thread is about.


>
>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.

Besides the GPL that I mentioned above, the day Apple hired Steve Jobs
back was the end of the company as it was. It was not a big deal in the
end because Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and was about to lay
everyone off and sell off their assets to pay creditors. 

What tipped it over the edge was that the marketing department knew it
and "stuffed the channel", e.g. selling boxes on credit to get commissions,
when the company could not afford the credit and most of them would be
returned because there was no retail market for them. 

The first thing Jobs did was to put NeXT people into critical positions.

The Next takeover of Apple (which it was, all except for name), turned
out to be a good thing, Apple survived, although it as a computer company
is still very small. IMHO Apple as a computer company suffers from the
success of the iPod, iTunes and now the iPhone.

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

The Linux port was an undersupported effort. If you could run Linux on
an X86 for less than the cost of a Sun keyboard and mouse, why bother?
I don't want to go into a discussion about it, but suffice it to say
we all know where the "X86 running Linux is better than a Sun running
Solaris costing 10 times the price" arguments have ended up.

>
>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.

Been there, done that. Will never do another Linux device unless there
is a lot of cash up front. Since the public is basicly stupid, you can
sell them a Linux device which does almost nothing, but runs Linux.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM