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We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

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Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#181

Post by vetinari »

fit2rule wrote: post #90
vetinari wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning (10.0 - 10.2 timeframe), OSX was pretty much broken if you wanted to work on software that was destined for Linux. Even the existing software was PITA to get running on OSX, you were fighting both autotools and OSX linker and libraries at once.

Not strictly true, it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project. (Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned s…

> it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project.

You had to take care to use libraries/APIs that were available at all three systems (no dlopen() or dlsym() at the time in OSX!), and take quirks of the OSX linker into account.

(Disclaimer: I was getting angry at Apple at the time. In a few years, they went through OS9->OSX migration, getting rid of Classic mode in emulation and now switching to Intel. They were breaking compatibility again; it meant buying new software like MS Office again - looking at the PC side, they didn't have such problem. So PB12 was my last Mac for a long time... until 2015, actually).

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#182

Post by MustardTiger »

deng wrote: post #7
gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

None of that thrived because of linux. And OSX didn't depend on them at all, it simply provided some of them. OSX would still exist without bash.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#183

Post by tobltobs »

MrTonyD wrote: post #127
ktRolster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. Seriously?

It's easy to forget the early days of Linux. If you go back and read the articles of the time they often pointed out that Linux made a good print server. But that was about all it could do - get lpr-style requests and talk to a printer driver. I did a test port of Oracle to Linux and wrote up a white paper for Larry. Larry was trying to figure out how to get Bill to kill important features in SQLServer. So Larry and…

> Bill agreed to make SQL Server work more poorly stop competing so aggressively.

I might have been living under a rock and everybody but me already heard about this story. But I would expect that every HN reader would drop his coffee cup reading this for the first time.

Is this true? Why had I never heard about it? Why should Bill do that?

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#184

Post by HerraBRE »

kardashev wrote: post #87

From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr: Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again. --------------------------------------------------…

You wrote: "Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations."

I think this is dangerously wrong. It completely glosses over and overlooks the fact that economies of scale are real and larger organizations can solve larger problems.

The guy with the machine gun will win the karate tournament if the tournament has no rules. Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric.

You don't need laws on your side when you can just buy up your upstart competitors, or price them out of the market with loss leaders.

In this context, one of the few tools the community has to create a level playing field, is software licensing. In particular, *GPL style licenses tend to make things much fairer, by imposing rules on all parties that prevent one from profiting asymmetrically off the work of the others.

Open Source, of the permissive variety, does the opposite. Corporations can use the code as they wish and not give back to the community. Community efforts to compete are always at a disadvantage because anything good they create can be folded into the proprietary solutions. So closed, built on open, beats purely open.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#185

Post by ambulancechaser »

MrTonyD wrote: post #127
ktRolster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. Seriously?

It's easy to forget the early days of Linux. If you go back and read the articles of the time they often pointed out that Linux made a good print server. But that was about all it could do - get lpr-style requests and talk to a printer driver. I did a test port of Oracle to Linux and wrote up a white paper for Larry. Larry was trying to figure out how to get Bill to kill important features in SQLServer. So Larry and…

I'm not sure that I see the connection between Linux at Oracle and the group of "Larry, Scott, IBM and HP" wanting Bill Gates to neuter SqlServer. Could you explain in more detail? This whole saga is fascinating, especially since I've come from a generation where Linux has such a connotation of quality.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#186

Post by lmm »

astrodust wrote: post #88
lmm wrote: post #55

We lost Linux. The big thing about Linux was that you could swap out pieces of it for better ones if you wanted. "Linux is about choice" - vi or emacs, KDE or Gnome and so on. OSX doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. And in these days of systemd, Linux doesn't even have that any more.

If you hate systemd that much make your own distribution with blackjackd and hookersd instead.

I did. But I can't stop the systemd folk making every program hard-depend on systemd. So I already can't use e.g. gnome (unless I wanted to maintain my own fork of an old version - am I supposed to maintain every single piece of software I use?)

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#187

Post by [deleted] »

MrTonyD wrote: post #127
ktRolster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. Seriously?

It's easy to forget the early days of Linux. If you go back and read the articles of the time they often pointed out that Linux made a good print server. But that was about all it could do - get lpr-style requests and talk to a printer driver. I did a test port of Oracle to Linux and wrote up a white paper for Larry. Larry was trying to figure out how to get Bill to kill important features in SQLServer. So Larry and…

[deleted]

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#188

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

MrTonyD wrote: post #82
gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

>> I've always found it ironic that the open source community ignores the role of the rich and powerful in allowing them to succeed.

I don't think anyone ignores anything, it's more like the OSS community (of which I'm not a part, btw) simply doesn't feel that their freedom is a good price to pay for - anything, really.

Also, to be fair, the "rich and powerful" mostly get into peoples' way when we try to live our lives in a meaningful way, and that includes OSS folk, who just like to write and exchange software. If the "rich and powerful" decide to patent everything, which is the real sticking point for the OSS community, then the OSS folk have no toys to play with.

Understandably, they are not happy with that.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#189

Post by kahnpro »

rpdillon wrote: post #91
simonh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he meant GNU why didn't he say so? Linux has nothing to do with OSX, whether you call it Linus or GNU/Linux. > The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything. And at a stroke the entire history of Sun, Solaris and Sun OS is brushed under the carpet as though it never existed. Yes. I give up. You win. Workstations only exist because of Linux. I think I need a litt…

> If he meant GNU why didn't he say so? Because people think it's cool to just call it Linux and endlessly deride Stallman for insisting it be called GNU/Linux, even though the nuance is very important in discussions like this one.

For starters, it doesn't sound idiotic to say "Linux" in conversation

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#190

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

MrTonyD wrote: post #153
feld wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then. "Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks wi…

Exactly. When I started doing the port of Oracle to Linux I had been reading the newsgroups - and they had been claiming POSIX compatibility. But system calls were missing many options, and entire sections of library code were missing. I'd run POSIX compatibility testing, so I knew that something didn't make sense. I kept posting to the news groups - mentioning that I was trying to port some software and hoping that…

>> I kept posting to the news groups

Which news groups were those? They (and your posts) should still be around somewhere.

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