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His main point is that a strong community is a strength, but many different communities leads to too many fragmented (and incompatible) codebases and ideas. So

by pugio 17y ago

His main point is that a strong community is a strength, but many different communities leads to too many fragmented (and incompatible) codebases and ideas. Some counterpoints: 1. The number of different implementations grew as the number of available computers and users grew. The number of smart people using each distro nowadays is probably still more than the total number of users of some of the original Unix implementations - the same implementations he says spawned the most good ideas. 2. Many different distros allows for many different ideas and paradigms to be tried out. Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions. Ideas that may never have gained traction in one massive community might find purchase in some of these splinter groups. The fracturing of the distros was a natural and necessary step in the evolution of the nix system. Yes, Microsoft managed to assert its dominance because it presented a single unified solution, but its heyday is nearing an end. Slowly, the myriad good ideas coming from the countless nix's are again unifying into a very strong front. Mac OS X (FreeBSD Unix) and Ubuntu (Debian Linux) are two great examples of how many different ideas have coalesced into a pleasing and usable system. Rob Pike ends his message with an injunction to the Unix users of the world to unite, to work together as opposed to walling themselves off in their own segmented communities. While I think the segmentation was beneficial and necessary, I do agree that a strong effort towards unifying the current crop of ideas into a uniform package is beneficial, if only to provide a seed for a whole new set of distros splintering off in new and unique directions.

thisrod 17y ago
"Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions." It's taking a very long time. At the current rate of transfer, Linux will take the whole 21st century to absorb the progress Plan 9 made in the 1980s. What I hope will happen, is that Linux will focus on the traditional OS role of abstracting hardware, and become purely a hypervisor system. That would exploit its strengths: the vast collection of device drivers, and systems such as network packet munging and LVM. It would provide a sane, consistent hardware interface, that sane, consistent application interfaces such as Plan 9, Oberon, and Alan Kay's new system could easily support.

by pugio 17y ago

thisrod 17y ago

"Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions." It's taking a very long time. At the current rate of transfer, Linux will take the whole 21st century to absorb the progress Plan 9 made in the 1980s. What I hope will happen, is that Linux will focus on the traditional OS role of abstracting hardware, and become purely a hypervisor system. That would exploit its strengths: the vast collection of device drivers, and systems such as network packet munging and LVM. It would provide a sane, consistent hardware interface, that sane, consistent application interfaces such as Plan 9, Oberon, and Alan Kay's new system could easily support.