3 ms·

I don't see why we need to pretend that every hobby has the potential for greatness. Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself. In fact in this instance I t

I don't see why we need to pretend that every hobby has the potential for greatness. Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself. In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again. The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when Linux was released and that competition is much more mature too. Plus the bar for a production-quality kernel is a lot higher than it was when Linux was released.

sennight 5y ago
> In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again. Seems apropos to me, given the fact that a Linux ABI compatible hobby project is under discussion - and that everyone here is familiar with the famous Usenet announcement. > The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when... I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. Fractured in a way that was meaningful - not like today where you can spin up a VM and be productive in short order, thanks to the significant lack of distinguishing difference. That is the really interesting thing about these hobby projects - they introduce possibilities that are either completely ignored by organizations suffering from inertia constraints, or can't be mimicked because they're diametrically opposed to present designs.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  > I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. There is way more competition now: + Linux (countless distributions) + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + DragonflyBSD + HardenedBSD + Darwin + Minix 3 (which wasn't free when Linux was released) + Illumos + OpenIndiana + Nexenta OS + SmartOS + ...and many others based off OpenSolaris / Illumos This isn't even an exhaustive list of UNIX-like platforms that are new since Linux and free. Don't conflate standardisation of the industry with a lack of options. More options do exist today and are in use (eg some games consoles run FreeBSD, Netflix uses BSD, Nexenta is used in some enterprise storage solutions, Darwin may not be used in any free capacity but macOS is clearly used heavily by HN readers, and so on and so forth). Moreover, I've used FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Nexenta and OpenBSD on production systems over the last 10 years (and the list gets more esoteric if we look past 10 years). So just because you might exist in a Linux-only ecosystem it doesn't mean that's the case for the entire IT industry.
  - sennight 5y ago
    Odd, you purportedly know the difference between an OS and a distro - but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? And to a degree that is no different from Netware vs OS/2?! Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment. > So just because you might exist in a Linux-only... Obnoxiously presumptuous.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      > but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. lol it's not nonsense. Every item I've listed offers something unique. > Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? Actually the differences in the Illumos derivatives are quite fundamental: - Nexentra is aimed at being an enterprise storage solution with Debian user land. That's massively unlike Illumos - Smart OS is designed to be a smarter virtualisation and containerisation host OS. It even bundles Linux's KVM virtualization. It's not intended to be run as a desktop platform - OpenIndiana and Illumos are probably the most similar, however OpenIndiana aims to be more true to OpenSolaris while Illumos aims to be more of a hybrid upstream. So while they're both multi-paradigm (like how Debian can be a desktop or server OS) there are some major differences in their commit tree. Honest question: how close are you to the Illumos projects? Or are you just an outsider looking in and making assumptions about equivalence based on your experience with Linux? I ask because Illumos forks are much more akin to BSD forks than they are Linux distros. > Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment. Even if you want to pare down the list to upstreams, you still have half a dozen BSDs (I really hope you at least have enough experience with BSD to realise these aren't just respins like Linux distros), Illumos, Minix, and Darwin. Verses your point in the 90s which was basically non-free BSD, non-free SysV, non-free QNX, non-free Minix etc....you still have those options now PLUS the ones I've listed. This is the problem with your argument. You're assuming the old choices have gone away, which they haven't...well, apart from SCO and Minix is now free. And in addition we have dozens of interesting new platforms, some of which I've exampled, too. There's no way on Earth we have less choice now than in the 90s. We might have the industry largely standardising on a subset but that's an entirely different argument and it's only representative of the lowest common denominator doing common problems. However if you look slightly outside of the status quo and you'd see there is a lot of variety still happening in the industry. I know this first hand too -- as I've said in my previous post, I've worked in plenty of places that weren't just Linux shops :)
_joel 5y ago
> Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself. Indeed, there's a word for it which I find particularly lovely, autotelic.
elihu 5y ago
> There's much more competition than there was when Linux was released and that competition is much more mature too. I think it's the opposite. When Linux was released, basically every major tech company had their own variant of Unix. Now almost everyone has migrated to Linux or Windows. Competing with modern Linux by creating a drop-in replacement for Linux would be a pretty difficult task given that people have been optimizing Linux for decades now, but on the other hand I think there are ways to improve dramatically on the traditional POSIX-style API that Linux mostly adheres to. For a random example, why can't a given process have more than one "current working directory" at a time? That seems like an arbitrary limitation imposed by an implementation detail in early Unix system, and it causes problems for modularity. There are many other little details like that. I think if Linux is replaced by something eventually, it'll most likely be because the new thing has a cleaner, more powerful, or more generally usable API. (Kerla is apparently not trying to invent a new API; I'm just saying that's the direction I would recommend to anyone project with a goal of seriously competing with Linux.)
- elihu 5y ago
  Follow up to add: another way to compete with Linux is on security. The Linux kernel generally has a pretty good security record I think, but there have been plenty of serious bugs over the years. How many exploitable array-out-of-bounds errors or use-after-free errors remain in the Linux kernel? No one knows. If you can rule those out by using a safer language, that might be compelling to a lot of users who care about security above other concerns. Of course that's hard to pull off in practice. Linux might have classes of errors that wouldn't exist if it were written in Rust, but even if using Rust eliminates three fourths of the code defects, the end result could be less secure if Linux gets ten or a hundred times as much scrutiny from people actively looking through the code for bugs to fix.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    If OpenBSD has taught us anything, it's that when you need to start hardening at that level, C stops becoming weakest link and actually the design of the broader UNIX ABIs are the bigger problem. This is why things like selinux and cgroups exist in Linux -- POSIX ABIs are about as secure as Win32 APIs in Windows and thus you need to take additional steps to isolate your running processes if you really care about them behaving.

sennight 5y ago

> In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again. Seems apropos to me, given the fact that a Linux ABI compatible hobby project is under discussion - and that everyone here is familiar with the famous Usenet announcement. > The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when... I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. Fractured in a way that was meaningful - not like today where you can spin up a VM and be productive in short order, thanks to the significant lack of distinguishing difference. That is the really interesting thing about these hobby projects - they introduce possibilities that are either completely ignored by organizations suffering from inertia constraints, or can't be mimicked because they're diametrically opposed to present designs.

hnlmorg 5y ago
> I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. There is way more competition now: + Linux (countless distributions) + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + DragonflyBSD + HardenedBSD + Darwin + Minix 3 (which wasn't free when Linux was released) + Illumos + OpenIndiana + Nexenta OS + SmartOS + ...and many others based off OpenSolaris / Illumos This isn't even an exhaustive list of UNIX-like platforms that are new since Linux and free. Don't conflate standardisation of the industry with a lack of options. More options do exist today and are in use (eg some games consoles run FreeBSD, Netflix uses BSD, Nexenta is used in some enterprise storage solutions, Darwin may not be used in any free capacity but macOS is clearly used heavily by HN readers, and so on and so forth). Moreover, I've used FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Nexenta and OpenBSD on production systems over the last 10 years (and the list gets more esoteric if we look past 10 years). So just because you might exist in a Linux-only ecosystem it doesn't mean that's the case for the entire IT industry.
- sennight 5y ago
  Odd, you purportedly know the difference between an OS and a distro - but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? And to a degree that is no different from Netware vs OS/2?! Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment. > So just because you might exist in a Linux-only... Obnoxiously presumptuous.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    > but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. lol it's not nonsense. Every item I've listed offers something unique. > Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? Actually the differences in the Illumos derivatives are quite fundamental: - Nexentra is aimed at being an enterprise storage solution with Debian user land. That's massively unlike Illumos - Smart OS is designed to be a smarter virtualisation and containerisation host OS. It even bundles Linux's KVM virtualization. It's not intended to be run as a desktop platform - OpenIndiana and Illumos are probably the most similar, however OpenIndiana aims to be more true to OpenSolaris while Illumos aims to be more of a hybrid upstream. So while they're both multi-paradigm (like how Debian can be a desktop or server OS) there are some major differences in their commit tree. Honest question: how close are you to the Illumos projects? Or are you just an outsider looking in and making assumptions about equivalence based on your experience with Linux? I ask because Illumos forks are much more akin to BSD forks than they are Linux distros. > Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment. Even if you want to pare down the list to upstreams, you still have half a dozen BSDs (I really hope you at least have enough experience with BSD to realise these aren't just respins like Linux distros), Illumos, Minix, and Darwin. Verses your point in the 90s which was basically non-free BSD, non-free SysV, non-free QNX, non-free Minix etc....you still have those options now PLUS the ones I've listed. This is the problem with your argument. You're assuming the old choices have gone away, which they haven't...well, apart from SCO and Minix is now free. And in addition we have dozens of interesting new platforms, some of which I've exampled, too. There's no way on Earth we have less choice now than in the 90s. We might have the industry largely standardising on a subset but that's an entirely different argument and it's only representative of the lowest common denominator doing common problems. However if you look slightly outside of the status quo and you'd see there is a lot of variety still happening in the industry. I know this first hand too -- as I've said in my previous post, I've worked in plenty of places that weren't just Linux shops :)

_joel 5y ago

> Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself. Indeed, there's a word for it which I find particularly lovely, autotelic.

elihu 5y ago

> There's much more competition than there was when Linux was released and that competition is much more mature too. I think it's the opposite. When Linux was released, basically every major tech company had their own variant of Unix. Now almost everyone has migrated to Linux or Windows. Competing with modern Linux by creating a drop-in replacement for Linux would be a pretty difficult task given that people have been optimizing Linux for decades now, but on the other hand I think there are ways to improve dramatically on the traditional POSIX-style API that Linux mostly adheres to. For a random example, why can't a given process have more than one "current working directory" at a time? That seems like an arbitrary limitation imposed by an implementation detail in early Unix system, and it causes problems for modularity. There are many other little details like that. I think if Linux is replaced by something eventually, it'll most likely be because the new thing has a cleaner, more powerful, or more generally usable API. (Kerla is apparently not trying to invent a new API; I'm just saying that's the direction I would recommend to anyone project with a goal of seriously competing with Linux.)

elihu 5y ago
Follow up to add: another way to compete with Linux is on security. The Linux kernel generally has a pretty good security record I think, but there have been plenty of serious bugs over the years. How many exploitable array-out-of-bounds errors or use-after-free errors remain in the Linux kernel? No one knows. If you can rule those out by using a safer language, that might be compelling to a lot of users who care about security above other concerns. Of course that's hard to pull off in practice. Linux might have classes of errors that wouldn't exist if it were written in Rust, but even if using Rust eliminates three fourths of the code defects, the end result could be less secure if Linux gets ten or a hundred times as much scrutiny from people actively looking through the code for bugs to fix.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  If OpenBSD has taught us anything, it's that when you need to start hardening at that level, C stops becoming weakest link and actually the design of the broader UNIX ABIs are the bigger problem. This is why things like selinux and cgroups exist in Linux -- POSIX ABIs are about as secure as Win32 APIs in Windows and thus you need to take additional steps to isolate your running processes if you really care about them behaving.