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It is hilarious to me that the Linux community continues to retell the "Have you ever kissed a girl?" chestnut after 14 years, and still fails to get the joke.
by kmavm 17y ago
It is hilarious to me that the Linux community continues to retell the "Have you ever kissed a girl?" chestnut after 14 years, and still fails to get the joke.
If you go back and read the original Usenet (not email) drama (http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html), it is Miller who sounds like an adolescent. From describing himself as "chief architect of the SparcLinux port," to the laughable wishful thinking of "Linux is light weight, Solaris is a pig," to the non-sequitur cheapshot of "Sun Quentin" (what is that supposed to mean? that Sun engineers are held against their will? that they're felons? what?), the entire post drips of the naive self-regard that, sadly, marked Linux's kernel community at the time.
I was regularly using both systems in 1996. Solaris worked. Linux did not. Miller was asking to be taken down several notches, and Cantrill did so in the fewest possible syllables.
- kls 17y agoMan reading that reminded me of why I disliked Linux and all of the "hackers" in that space at that time. The adolescent smugness was so thick back then. That email really took me back. OS zealotry seems to have died down since then, that or I have just gotten too old to care or notice.
- fnid2 17y agoIt's still a religious debate. I just talked about it with a professor in the field and he refuses to have a conversation about OS with other similar folks due to the lack of rationality in the debate.
- wrs 17y ago"Sun Quentin is the informal nickname of the offices of Sun Microsystems. Close proximity to the San Francisco bay and the architecture of the buildings are reminiscent of San Quentin, a California state prison." [from urbandictionary.com -- and personal experience]
- barrkel 17y agoThey may have missed the joke, but the problem is that adolescent obsessive compulsion to prove oneself does actually accumulate to certain kinds of advantages in the long term. Cantrill really was underestimating what he was up against.