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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.mathworks.com!gatech!news.uoregon.edu!symiserver.symantec.com!news.central.com!news From: tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD... X-Newsreader: IBM RN 3.8d (OS/2 2.0) bugfixed by mittelst@fh-ulm.de Sender: news@news.central.com (Usenet Netnews) Organization: Peter Norton Group, Symantec Corp. Beaverton Message-ID: <DC6vJ3.L53@news.central.com> Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 20:37:31 GMT Lines: 56 In <3us0rg$7ph@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> Jon Jenkins <jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com> writes: | Hi Marcus, | | [discussion deleted] | This may be real flame bait so please please | please dont reply as this a a really really | really subjective opinion but here goes: | | Unless the UNIX community gets together | and provides the common toolsets to develop | fast cheap GUI applications including | system admin and configuration and | mulitmedia in an object based paradigm | then I predict that within 10 years | UNIX will be relagated to | academic circles with NT and OS/2 being | the predominat OS for both Goverment and | commercial systems. | | Jon If this happens I couldn't be more pleased. Looking back on the history of Unix I can only point to a few good things that ever came out of commercial vendors dicking around with it. The vast majority of good things in Unix today came out of universitys, mainly grad students, not to mention the enjoyable names as well. Can you imagine a commercial vendor naming a program "lint" for example? In contrast, I can think of much screwed up crap that comes from the commercial businesses. Like, SCO's hate affair with the SYSVR4 kernel, for example. Or, even better, what about NIS from Sun? If you look at all of the good things that are in NT and OS/2 they all originated with work done on the Unix operating system. Well, with OS/2 some came also from IBM's work on SYS/36 but the point is there. Commercial vendors simply don't have the ability to allow the wide lattitude for truely revolutionary ideas to be brought to fufillment. All commercial businesses that are really successful in the computer business have strong ties to academic institutions, either official ties or unofficial. Businesses are really great at taking a good idea that isin't really fleshed out and refining the heck out of it to make it palatable to the consumer. But, they stink at coming up with truely original ideas. The next great advances in operating systems will originate in the academic community, and be refined by commercial entities. That is how it always has been and how it always will be. So what if these ideas are brought from Unix into a commercial OS? As long as there are geniuses in the academic community who hack out their ideas in Unix and there are intelligent people in the business comjmunity smart enought to apply these ideas to commercial products there will be a home for everyone, believe me.