*BSD News Article 47829


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From: nate@trout.sri.MT.net (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD...
Date: 25 Jul 1995 17:39:59 GMT
Organization: SRI Intl. - Montana Operations
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <3v3a9f$47q@helena.MT.net>
References: <DC6vJ3.L53@news.central.com> <3v01bh$q7q@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>
Reply-To: "Nate Williams" <nate@sneezy.sri.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: trout.sri.mt.net

In article <3v01bh$q7q@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>,
Jon Jenkins  <jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com> wrote:
>>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

Just for clarification, NT is *NOT* based on the mach kernel, although a
few of the big Mach folks do work for M$, and probably have brought in
many of the features of Mach into NT.

AFAIK, NT is still a monolith kernel, although it has loadable drivers
which give it a 'micro-kernelish' flavor.  But, Sun boxes have been
doing this for awhile and all of the free *nix clones also have this
ability as well.

>>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.

Alot of really neat stuff was done in VMS, and a lot of credit must be
given to Apollo for DNS.  But, I think that most *truly* new ideas have
come from educational institutions because they don't have anything to
lose if the project fails.

> The most successful computer buisness of them all: MS has no ties to
> any academic institution apart from selling sw to students.

And it has yet to provide anything revolutionary in terms of software.



Nate

-- 
nate@sneezy.sri.com    | Research Engineer, SRI Intl. - Montana Operations
nate@trout.sri.MT.net  | Loving life in God's country, the great state of
work #: (406) 449-7662 | Montana.  Wanna go fishing?  Send me email, and we'll
home #: (406) 443-7063 | setup something.