*BSD News Article 73792


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From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: TCP latency
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 23:58:37 -0500
Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine
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Larry McVoy wrote:

>
> The Unix world is fond of letting personalities be more important
> than survival.
>
Who is the most profound single personality in the free U**X world?
It isn't me, is it? :-).  Lemme guess, Bill Jolitz? -- Hmmm, no.
Oh yeah Linus!!!  (There was indeed an implication here, from now
on, I'll make it clear when I have double-meanings in my statements.)
The FreeBSD team can get along nicely without me (and I have thought
about it).  There is almost NO cult of personality in the *BSD's
at all.  We had to grow away from that model, or die.  I would expect
that half of the BSD crews could disappear, and their roles would be
filled quickly by people who are very competent.

Even though the differences between the *BSDs have both machine
dependent and independent components, it is very interesting to do
a diff on the networking code between the *BSD's.  Modulo some minor
differences, they are the same.  We do share code very aggressively.
Perhaps the most profound difference is that FreeBSD has been able
to focus on the X86 platform as a prototype, and doesn't have to deal
with the issues of changing N ports every time we find a major performance
improvement in (for example) the VM system (or other I/O systems.)

>
> That's fine if all you want to do is play around, but
> what if you would actually like to be able to use Unix technology to
> solve problems?
>
FreeBSD is the platform of choice for several applications that
I know of.  People use it even though it is not nearly as common
as NT or Linux.  I see that as a testimony to FreeBSD's performance,
reputation and reliability.  I will state that FreeBSD is not perfect,
but the team and contributors are working on it with great commitment.

>
> My premise throughout all of this has been that the smart minds need to
> work together to make a good OS.  For whatever reason, the BSD crowds
> can't seem to handle more than a handful of smart people working on
> their version of their Unix.
>
Again Net/Free and Free/Open do share code freely.  We even share ideas
and it is relatively more easy to share ideas between us, because our
code bases are so similar.  The diversity is actually good in that
ideas get tested by different groups.

>
> I'd like to think that in 10 years, Unix will still be an interesting
> platform for technical computing.  How is BSD going to help that be
> true?
>
How is Linux going to help that be true? :-).  FreeBSD is growing, perhaps
not super quickly.  But it is steadily growing.  If I happen to go away,
my name might be left on some code, but there is critical mass in the
FreeBSD program, independent of personality.

John