Re: Linus Geek of the Week

["Dan Ritter-2" <user=13@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 09:10:25AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote: 
> Why did Linux emerge as the premier system over FreeBSD (and other BSD 
> derivatives), I don't know. Maybe just the appeal of the name. 

I would argue that the BSDs were always too controlled. 
Linux-the-kernel didn't come with officially blessed shells and init 
systems and libc and compilers. From the very beginning, people brought 
out competing distributions. 

BSD always had a core system, controlled by the core development 
team. There was (is) a lot of pressure to keep it working, and thus to 
keep it stable. Why would you develop a different libc?  If you cared 
sufficiently about libc, you would work on the existing one. If you 
really had issues, you might schism -- but you had to get really worked 
up over it, because you would then have to maintain the whole core 
system by yourself, not just the chunk you cared about. It was hard, and 
people in the community would give you a hard time about it. 

At the same time, Linux distros popped up by the dozens. If you had 
a preferred philosophy, you could specify it, gather the packages 
you wanted, make the changes you needed, and go forth and spread 
the evangelical word. Single-floppy rescue disk? Embedded OS with 
minimal RAM requirements? Bootable LiveCDs? Nobody was going to 
seriously criticize you until you started making grandiose claims of 
superiority.  Projects that didn't make much sense fell by the wayside, 
but their ideas continue in flexible meta-distros that let you build the 
distribution you actually want out of the parts provided. 

Cooperative competition, versus cooperate-or-go-away. That's 
how Linux spread. 

-dsr- 

-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference. 

When freedom gets lots of exercise, it protects itself. 

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