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From: ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.unix.bsd
Subject: You can't escape the real world (Was Re: BYTE asks, is UNIX dead?)
Date: 28 Sep 1992 18:54:31 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <1a8d0nINNmlr@almaak.usc.edu>
References: <bibhas.717685421@femto.engr.mun.ca> <3725@eastman.UUCP> <KETIL.92Sep28210509@spurv.ii.uib.no> <1992Sep28.233905.23634@cs.brown.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: almaak.usc.edu
wcn@cs.brown.edu (Wen-Chun Ni) writes:
>I thought comp.os.linux is the best place for friendly people to talk
>about what they get in playing/working with Linux.
>commercial Unixes. You can't push Linux to the mainstream world without
>money. I'd rather stay in such kind of underground subculture in
>the seemingly uglier computer society.
Working in a small underground where you don't have to deal with
nasty issues is a nice ideal. In the computer industry it is
not really a practical option.
Witness the Moto 68k for example. If you loved the 68020
architecture, you would be incredibly pissed off at it's demise (at
the hands of Intel and RISC). In this business, if you care for a
product idea you can't leave it to the free market. By itself, the
free market will produce obscenities like Microsoft.
Specifically, the Unix bandwagon in general (Linux in particular) is
living off the common skills of thousands of good software guys
worldwide, the existence of good books, the free software, phenomena
like Cygnus Support and Lucid Emacs, etc. To the extent that like
Unix is able to encroach on DOS/Windows/OS2, these infrastructural
inputs will get better. For every ten engineers writing commercial
Unix software one will write some free software in his spare time.
University kids are likely to be more willing to learn Unix skills if
they think there is a good market for Unix programmers in the real
world. While at school they are likely to produce good free software.
In sum: If Unix is able to do well in the OS wars then the world of
free software will greatly benefit.
And conversely. Insane as it may sound, Microsoft would like to have
us believe that Windows NT is going to be the single dominant OS over
a hundred different forms of hardware, just the way Unix has been for
the last decade. Are you going to enjoy seeing such a world come
about? I doubt it. If not, do something about it. Convince one
peasant each day about your world view.
-ans.
--
Ajay Shah, (213)749-8133, ajayshah@usc.edu