>On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Frank Warren wrote:
>
>> nonsensical religious abstractions which are meaningful
>> to less than a tiny fraction of a percent of the world.
>
>It's just that, this tiny fraction of the world is writing all the world's
>useful OS code, and no one else will dare try.


I challenge this statement on this ground.  Nobody but the hacks want any
flavor of BSD or Linux.  Everyone else is happy with Windows.  Literally, in
the case of BSD and Linux flavors, we're all having trouble GIVING it away.

>Not even Apple.  They stole MacOS X piecewise from various ``nonsensical
>religious'' camps--Mach, NeXT, BSD's.


Yes.  And they got buried too, didn't they?

>The people who do try are generally laughed at.


What is the mission of a computer?  Ask different people and one will get
different answers, and therein lies the counterpoint.

>> What remains of UNIX is not a thriving community, but one that, apart
>> from the Internet, would be a backwater eddy of a genre surviving only
>> on old, junk hardware.
>
>This is an interesting opinion, simply because I haven't heard anyone
>present it since ten years ago.  I think if these OS wars have shown
>anything, it's the surprising value of Unix. Given how old it is, this is
>a very discouraging discovery.  Basically everything the industry has
>tried, failed:  microkernels, system V, Windows NT--no one is doing any
>research and development on these things, because they don't have a
>future.  BSD and Linux are the hot stuff thetse days.


It happens to be true.  And that's because of the attitude that the market
as a whole takes towards computers.  The world is largely divided into two
camps -- religious zealots, who may produce something new and useful, and
the large, slack-jawed general population who see a computer as a
sometimes-useful nuisance and don't want to learn, don't want to know, and
don't want to be bothered.  I am a bit of such a religious zealot myself for
even messing with BSD generally.  This puts me with both feet firmly in the
Zealot camp even if I am not myself a zealot.

>This is not good.  It's bad.  It means we've been making nothing but
>mistakes for the last 20 years.  It's like monks in the dark ages reading
>Greek.  It's pathetic.


Concur.  But you must realize that the development has been driven by
commercial interests, and all they care for is profit.  The Zealots, in the
end, may be the hope of the world.  The KDE project is trying to make UNIX
accessible to the dunderheads, and that has always been the real stumbling
block to UNIX, that is, its inaccessibility.

But there is another way to look at all this.

Isn't it possible that Thompson and Ritchie perceived the most fundamental
needs of the computing and development community lo these many decades ago,
and BSD brought it forward and kept it current with advances in less costly
hardware?  Is Isaac Newton obsolete in the macrocosmic world?  It's possible
that they established a plateau that will take some time and much more study
to exceed.  There is also this danger in being a zealot.  One may miss the
forest for the trees.

>But, I would think the _last_ thing anyone would question in today's
>industry climate would be that Unix turned out to be the only OS worth a
>damn.  It's sobering, even humiliating, but it's painfully obvious.  Unix
>is still the only thing taught in schools.  Unix is still the only thing
>people turn to as a reference when they're writing their doomed notUnix
>OS's.
>
>Believe me, I tried just about everything to avoid using Unix.  I've used
>DOS, DoubleDOS, DESQview, a couple versions of OS/2, Windows since version
>1.03, a couple versions of NT; the only thing I didn't try out back in
>those dark years was QNX.  and it's really too bad because QNX might have
>bought me a clue.  but the ftn software for QNX sucked, so, so much for
>that.  bastards.


Concur again.  I've been down the same road.  UNIX, BSD in particular, is
unavoidable at this point in time if one wants to do serious new work.
Everything else, except possibly OS/2, was and is a joke.  And BSD brings
real strengths to the table with its licensing.

>I often ask people, ``have you noticed that your computers crash, _a lot_,
>and that they often do strange, unexpected things rather than what you
>tell them to, and that he helpdesk people often aren't much better at
>fixing them than you are?''  They usually know right where I'm going.
>
>They chime in, ``well, from a pragmatic point of view, my computer does
>everything I need it to, and the Microsoft stuff is really well-targeted
>to my needs and does everything i need and works together to do the stuff
>i need to get done, at work.'' They seem to be saying, ``please, _please_
>for the love of god don't change _anything!_ My computer is just barely
>working as it is--i don't want to try out any of this fancypants new stuff
>because then i won't be able to get my work done _at all_ and i'll be
>fired.'' They are downright _afraid_ to even _investigate_ competing
>possibilities.  Vote for Stalin!  The man of Steel!  He brings us Food!
>
>Mac's suck!
>Unix is for Developers!
>I don't _want_ to know anything more--i know too much already!


99% of everything sucks.  And BSD ain't entirely past that yet, although it
will get there.

>You seem to feel that Unix is a worthless operating system because it
>lacks an Office Suite and a Web Browser.  First of all, office suites and
>web browsers aren't part of the operating system.  This is, like i said,
>marketing bullshit.  Second of all, it doesn't lack them.


I never said it was, and don't think that way.  What I do think is that the
obtuse nature of native UNIX locks a lot of folks out.  What you and I find
interesting scares hell out of the average office worker.  As I said, maybe
KDE and the market can fix that.

>Well, at least if you're running an i386 (or maybe a SPARC), you're in
>good shape. If you're running NetBSD or FreeBSD, you can run FreeBSD and
>Linux i386 binaries.


I'm running FreeBSD at the moment because I can't get NetBSD where I need it
to be (not enough of a BSD hack yet).  I look forward to correcting this.

I'm going to snip the stuff about how BSD has enough apps.  They are paltry
compared to Windows apps.  Things are headed in the right direction. What I
will remind you of is that NetBSD in particular is not competing to be a
desktop-for-everyone OS.  It is targeted at developers.  I think this is
both good and healthy.  FreeBSD is playing that game, as is Linux, and there
is no need for NetBSD to do it as well.  Most people would have no clue what
to do with a Sun3 if you gave them one, and a set of manuals besides.

The real issue is one of accessibility, always has been, may not always be.
We'll see.

>Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
>555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US
>
>