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From: Jon Jenkins <jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD...
Date: 24 Jul 1995 11:49:05 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp
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tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
>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?
Im sure Ken Thompson and the other UNIX designers at
AT&T Bell Labs (a very commercial organisation) would
have been very heartened to read your comments!! System V
(nee Novell nee ???) continues to be a fully
commercial product whereas the BSD variant is
not and we wont mention XENIX (mainly cause I dont
know anything about it :-).
But I bascially agree with you and the current
discussion was aimed at the non commercial sector.
>
>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.
This is patently untrue. NT is based on the mach kernel
which is a significant departure from the traditional
monolith kernel. The only other UNIXish group to do this
prior to OSF/1 was Next. Just beacuse the interface
is similar does not imply the guts are eg Win32s and NT.
OS/2 also started life as pre-NT when IBM and MS were a
little closer friends than now!!
The one area where there is much common ground is networking
but remember the IP paradigm was started in the late 60's
as a DARPA funded packet siwtching project
long before UNIX was conceived!
>
>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.
Im sure the VMS people at DEC would also be heartened
to hear this comment. The most successful computer buisness
of them all: MS has no ties to any academic institution
apart from selling sw to students.
>
>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?
This may well be true but the reverse is also true. There
are a lot of awfully smart prople in the commecial
sector too and the larger companies like DEC, IBM,
HP, Fujitsu and the recently defunct Cray etc
spend a whole lot more money on research than
the universities get in grants. The increasing scale
and complexity of OS requires mucho dollars and will
probably also require a pre existing revolution
in hw concepts as well.
>
>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.
I agree wholeheartedly and also state that the reverse
applies: any good idea conceived in the commercial sector
will find its way into and be improved upon in the academic
community.
Anyway we are a little off topic here. This startred
as a discussion about the future of FreeBSD, perhaps
enough has been said.
Thanks for your comments
Jon
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Dr Jon Jenkins
Location: Digital Equipment Corp, NaC,
Burnett Place, Research Park,
Bond University, Gold Coast
QLD, AUSTRALIA 4229
Phone: 61-75-75-0151
Fax: 61-75-75-0100
Internet: jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com
Close Proximity: "HEY YOU !!!"
The opinions expressed above are entirely personal and do not
reflect the corporate policy of DEC or the opinions of DEC management.
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