Some, not all. There is a lot of innovation in that community. That
there is also a lot of copying doesn't change that.
If you apply the same thing to all of industry, you could make precisely
the same observation.
As for Gates, he has borrowed most of his ideas too; BASIC was no more
original than most other code at the time, he simply (and perfectly
sensibly) decided to control it as property.
(I can't help pointing out, however, that "theft" has a specific legal
meaning which doesn't apply to software where you are not depriving the
person of their personal possessions).
If you think the command line is the essence of Unix, you have missed
almost the entire point. The command line is a common feature, but the
more important features in a modern unix-like system was to do with its
abstractions (whether VFS, security model, memory model, network layer,
whatever).
Whilst you could argue that your criticisms about dependencies apply to
Linux (though there are counter-arguments), how do you claim this for
Minix? Minix is designed to be a Microkernel, and the subsystems are
separated and communicate through the (traditional microkernel) message
passing. This is why I say you're wrong that Linux and Minix are
closely related.
Why do you believe you're right?
Code can be the *expression* of ideas, particularly when well-executed.
Linux was deliberately designed to be useful in the real world. It was
designed against standards (things like the POSIX standards, the SuS,
SVRX and other similar documents) so that real software would be trivial
to port. This is what has guided a lot of its *interface* decisions.
On either side of the interfaces*, however, there has been plenty of
innovation, with all sorts of interesting work coming out of it.
Does that mean that closed-source is bad? I don't think so.
Does the stilted copycat projects that exist in open-source mean
open-source is devoid of invention? I don't think that either.
* And even some of the interfaces have developed. This has not been
without controversy.
Again, you are wrong. Torvaldsapologised to him at the time and has
repeated that apology since. As far as I can see, there are no hard
feelings on either side.
As Tanenbaum has stated clearly (in fact, in the same article I
referenced) he was (and is) more interested in his academic career than
having a successful career focused on Minix. I don't know howTorvalds
has done or if he *is* a millionaire, but I don't understand why you
wish to turn him into a bad guy.
There *is* no "fact" that Linux stopped OS development in its tracks.
That's just something you want to assert. OS development has certainly
slowed but (I'd *assert*) this is more to do with the fact that kernels
became "good enough" and the CS community has been more interested in
other challenges in middleware and elsewhere. Finding ways to
distribute code across cores and systems (locally or globally) are the
route to Ph.D.s now. Is that Linux's (or Torvald's) fault? No more
than it's Microsoft's, Sun's or Apple's fault.
You are also wrong that Tanenbaum is unrecognised for Minix. Sure, he's
not known outside of CS whileTorvaldsis (to a greater extent), but he
never *was* known outside of the CS community. How hasTorvaldsfame
cost him? If anything, it drew attention to Minix and has written him
another page in history. I must say, however, Minix is not his most
important work in my opinion.
Finally, the 2038 problem is as solved as it can be. The standard
time_t for 64 bit systems (which any serious system these days will be)
is 64 bits. That gives us more time than I'm going to worry about
(many, many millennia). There are some minor issues in 64 bit Unix like
library support for dates in the far-future:
- HPUX only recognise up to Dec 31 9999, 23:59:59 UTC
in their 64 bit systems for functions like "ctime"
- glibc on Fedora 12, x86_64 only seems to handle up to
Dec 31 2147483647, 23:59:59 UTC. I can live with this.
The biggest problems can't be solved by the OS designers, however, and
that's where people have written code with the assumptions in the code,
particularly where people aren't using time_t and/or are abusing the
type in the way they perform arithmetic. This would be the case no
matter which language or OS you were dealing with.
As with Y2K, it will depend on code review. People running shoddy code
have work to do, particularly if the code is heading to overruns earlier
(the classic example being banks calculating mortgage repayments over
25/30 year terms).
If that were the case, it would make your pursuit of Seebs on behalf of
Schildt even harder to explain.
You have accusedTorvaldsof being a thief (amongst other things).
Whether or not you retract and apologise is entirely up to you.
As forTorvalds, you are almost certainly right he doesn't care. He's
big enough and smart enough to defend himself even if he does, so I
won't patronise him by pretending otherwise. I'm certain that's the
position someone like Herb Schildt would take too.
This doesn't make your wild assertions correct, though. Are you big
enough to concede the points I've made here?
It's entirely up to you.
Let's take a look at Torvalds' reply to Tanenbaum's polite and
reasoned 1992 post, "Linux is obsolete":
http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html
Torvalds: "You use this as an excuse for the limitations of minix?
Sorry, but you
loose: I've got more excuses than you have, and linux still beats the
pants of minix in almost all areas. Not to mention the fact that most
of the good code for PC minix seems to have been written by Bruce
Evans."
Two half-literate spelling errors and a grandiose claim. Linux "beat
the pants off" minix only in empirical speed for chips of 1992. To say
this was a win was to be ignorant of Moore's Law.
Torvalds: "Re 1: you doing minix as a hobby - look at who makes money
off minix,
and who gives linux out for free. Then talk about hobbies. Make
minix
freely available, and one of my biggest gripes with it will
disappear.
Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type)
for
me: I get no money for it, and it's not even part of any of my studies
in the university. I've done it all on my own time, and on my own
machine."
Torvalds is anticipating millions at this point because he's creating,
unlike Tanenbaum, a resource for IBM that virtual slave labor will
complete, not him; and if any of these coding slaves get uppity they
will be savaged in public as I am. Torvalds did indeed become a
millionaire while claiming to be a benefactor of mankind; Tanenbaum
did not, precisely because Torvalds destroyed any opportunity to make
money by writing OSen. News flash: benefactors of mankind feed the
hungry and clothe the naked. They don't clone OSen, and they DON'T
destroy the middle class by deliberately working for free, especially
while living with Mommie and Daddy.
Torvalds: "Re 2: your job is being a professor and researcher: That's
one hell of a
good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. I can only hope
(and
assume) that Amoeba doesn't suck like minix does."
The Maoist and Fascist anti-intellectualism starts right here, because
instead of speaking truth to power, it's always safer and more fun to
gang up on professors. It makes you look like a Big Man, like one of
the Nazi thugs let us now say (for let us not speak falsely now the
hour is much too late) that disrupted classes in the Weimar Republic.
These were the Nazis and Maoists who could not write a sentence
without grammar and spelling errors, nor get past a low upper bound of
complexity without confusion, but found the High German of the German
professors too complex and the Four Olds of the Chinese professors
counter-revoltionary even though they could not read classical Chinese
or traditional characters.
This was Torvalds' first response. It is clear that Torvalds set the
style for attacking professors and authors in the name of creating
software by means of slave labor. He was a bitter, twisted little
graduate student who stole Minix. Tanenbaum was basically just to
decent to kick his fucking ass.
