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Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

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Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#91

Post by namdnay »

cpeterso wrote: post #70

In contrast, here is a thread about Debian, after much deliberation, unanimously choosing to break kernel ABI compatibility with VMware. They didn't want to increase the ABI number during a "freeze", even though they broke the ABI. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=607368

Slightly off-topic, but often when reading these mailing lists I find some developers to be rather unhelpful, if not downright nasty.

Take this example. Now I realise this isn't a company-client relationship we're looking at, but am I alone in thinking a bit more diplomacy wouldn't have gone amiss?

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#92

Post by sanderjd »

sixbrx wrote: post #81
abrahamsen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, it most likely refers to this discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_frm/thre... Linus was a kid in 1992, and got scolded by one of the greatest icons of the field. That could still sting 20 years later.

I always thought Linus gave better than he got in that argument, myself. He was pretty brutal to Minix in a couple of places. BTW. love the reference to "BSD detox" somewhere in that thread, it always gives me a chuckle.

Yeah GP seems to imply Linus lost that debate. Quite the contrary, Tannenbaum titled his post "LINUX is obsolete", so the argument was fundamentally about whether he was right about his title, or whether he was wrong - the last two decades of history have pretty clearly proven him wrong.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#93

Post by jonhohle »

namdnay wrote: post #87
jonhohle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The Publisher in this case is the programmer - or at least distributor - of the program. Content consumers are the intended user.

I have to disagree with you there, clearly the user of DRM is the copyright holder. They are using the tool to perform their activity, that of "safely" leasing their content to consumers. In the same way, the user of DirectX is the game publisher, not the consumer who buys the game.

I am my DVD player's user. The copyright holder does not come to my house to operate my DVD player. It will not allow me to play discs not encoded for my region. This program is not written for my preference or use, but in opposition to me. It also does not allow me to bypass certain segments of videos. Again - it opposes me.

If it was written for me - the user - it would allow me to bypass all content and jump directly to the first title of every disc I inserted. The producers of this software have explicitly made it hostile to the user. I'm not saying this is not within their rights - I'm just saying it is.

But this is a rat hole. My point was that this is not what Linus was saying. He was merely describing the purpose of one software component. A kernel is a hardware abstraction - a platform for building applications without concern for the details of components - including the version of the kernel itself. He was arguing against breaking that contract by introducing a change which fit the whims of the contributor but would break an unknown number of binaries compiled against that contract.

tl;dr - "user" is not the same as "user-space"

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#94

Post by mappu »

eCa wrote: post #90
ot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sentence is a betrayal of UNIX's history: There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. (Jeremy S. Anderson)

Linux is not Unix?

No, Unix is a trademark. You can call your unix-like OS Unix only if you conform to SUS or something like that.

GNU is definitely not Unix.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#95

Post by derleth »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

In my experience binary compatibility on linux is a train wreck. Ever tried to get a binary compiled 5 years ago to run on a fresh install of linux? Good luck. If you still have the specific version of every shared library that it loaded you might be able to get it to work. This isn't the fault of the kernel team though. It is probably to be expected on platforms in which distributing source code is the default optio…

> Ever tried to get a binary compiled 5 years ago to run on a fresh install of linux?

I run older binaries on Linux all the time.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#96

Post by hythloday »

acqq wrote: post #53
muuh-gnu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had to upgrade Windows (including all installed apps) to be able to install some other random app. On Linux, having to upgrade the distro (including getting a new desktop environment force-installed) to get a new version of any random app is established practice. Example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3822

If you claim that you "never had to upgrade Windows to be able to install some other random app" you probably haven't used Windows much then. There are games that need explicit version or newer of DirectX. You can't even produce from the C or C++ sources the binary application that runs on any Windows XP with the latest Visual Studio (11). Any C/C++ application built with Visual Studio 2010 won't run on Windows 2000…

Do you happen to know how many users are running Windows < XP/SP3? For our install base (games company) it's less than 1%. Is there a compelling reason not to upgrade to SP3 if you're on XP?

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#97

Post by gillianseed »

mllell wrote: post #25
unicron wrote: post #12

I reckon that "drug induced microkernel" was a stab at Tanenbaum :-)

It could be the hurd project. He does have that semi-famous "just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people" quote.

No it was an obvious (and in my opinion childish) stab at Minix/Tanenbaum (although Tanenbaum sure is just as childish) given that Tanenbaum is still saying that Linux and monolithic kernels are bad, Stallman on the other hand openly admitted his mistake in going with the mach microkernel. The Linus/Tanenbaum adversity is as alive as ever judging by comments like this and the recent-ish interview with Tanenbaum : http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229/comments/1291183 where his comments on Linux and it's success is very telling.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#98

Post by gillianseed »

radious wrote: post #30
andreime wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel search Windows or NT. OS X, Linux and NT don't use microkernels.

NT and OS X use hybrid kernels (as well as Plan9). Linus believe that hybrid is another term for monolithic, but rest of the world does not. AFAIR micro- ones are used by QNX and Minix. Monolithic kernels are used by Linux, *BSD (with an exception for Dragonfly, which uses hybrid kernel), Solaris, AIX(?) and more SysV descendants.

Count me out of 'the rest of the world' then. Perhaps you can point me to the what part of NT which would make it a hybrid kernel as opposed to Linux. I've never seen any explanation of this.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

#99

Post by jff »

saurik wrote: post #89
muuh-gnu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for The problem is that no app dev targets stable distros, but always goes for the latest and greatest from the upstream so distros are constantly forced to update libs and change the base system. So with a stable distro, you cant get a new version of an app, because the libs of your distro are too old, and you need to upgrade the whole distro just to…

> The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. This used to be RedHat: software for Linux would often come as either 1) source code (if open), 2) a crazy .sh install script, and 3) an RPM package for RedHat 5.

It is now Ubuntu. I think damn near all Linux software I see now has an Ubuntu .deb available.
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