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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!panix!ddsw1!a2i!dandelion.com!not-for-mail From: Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@dandelion.com> Subject: Re: Call for 386BSD Rel.1.0 SIG (Special Interest Group) In-Reply-To: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu's message of 19 Aug 1994 03:45:54 GMT Message-ID: <334kg1$1l2@kelewan.dandelion.com> Sender: Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@dandelion.com> Nntp-Posting-Host: dandelion.com Organization: Dandelion Digital References: <jmonroyCuFvqp.BKv@netcom.com> <3319ti$7rl@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: Sat, 20 Aug 1994 10:04:49 GMT Lines: 55 In article <3319ti$7rl@agate.berkeley.edu> jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: Fine, we even believe you (sort of). But then the question still remains: "Why follow Bill?" No reason to at all. The other *BSD's are delivering solutions NOW, have delivered solutions for the last 18 months, during which time Bill had abandoned his users to an uncertain fate, and show every sign of continuing to do so. Considering that Bill's track record, not to put too fine a point on it, SUCKS, why should we trust him? I was somewhat disappointed in that I went to the talk hoping it would be far more technical in nature. What it provided was mostly an overview of the directions Bill's work had gone since the last talk about 1.5 years ago. I went both this week's and in Spring '93 to the SVnet talks Bill gave, and came away from it with a rather different view than perhaps some others have. After the most recent talk, I'm even more convinced that 386BSD is not about delivering product solutions of any kind. Rather, it is about delivering operating system research and explanations, essentially a detailed book about OS design that happens to come with runnable code. My impression is that the primary purpose of the delivered source code is to have working code rather than pseudo code to write about and explain, so that people can examine the code directly and modify it to test out other algorithms. More than once he spoke about the need for the reasons behind all the design decisions to be clearly presented, as a legacy for future researchers, so that the heart of Berkeley Unix would not be lost. This is a valuable contribution, it's just not the one some people were hoping for. I really never got the impression from this week's talk that the fundamental purpose was to deliver anything resembling a production quality operating system. Thinking back on the Spring '93 talk, it had very much the flavor of talking about research directions as well, though it was easy to infer a product quality to it, probably because that's what *I* wanted to believe. Well folks, the product is probably not what we've come to want from our NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Linux worlds -- the Jolitz' fundamental product seems to be their writings, and one of their goals to make those writings available to a wide range of people. Just look at the manner in which they are making it available -- accessibility in Windows sounded far more important than in its native environment! I may have this wrong since I wasn't paying attention during the early days of 386BSD; I am only going on what I heard during these two talks. Other folks who are closer to 386BSD may have seen something quite different, and I encourage them to explain their perceptions of the talks. However, if my understanding is correct, it would go a long way towards explaining why we have the separate groups working on *BSD systems we have today. Enough rambling for now... Leonard