
Is Linux For Losers? - apotheon
http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616theo.html
======
puredemo
Joey Naylor: ...so what happens when you're wrong?

Nick Naylor: Whoa, Joey I'm never wrong.

Joey Naylor: But you can't always be right...

Nick Naylor: Well, if it's your job to be right, then you're never wrong.

Joey Naylor: But what if you are wrong?

Nick Naylor: OK, let's say that you're defending chocolate, and I'm defending
vanilla. Now if I were to say to you: 'Vanilla is the best flavour ice-cream',
you'd say...

Joey Naylor: No, chocolate is.

Nick Naylor: Exactly, but you can't win that argument... so, I'll ask you: so
you think chocolate is the end all and the all of ice-cream, do you?

Joey Naylor: It's the best ice-cream, I wouldn't order any other.

Nick Naylor: Oh! So it's all chocolate for you is it?

Joey Naylor: Yes, chocolate is all I need.

Nick Naylor: Well, I need more than chocolate, and for that matter I need more
than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom. And choice when it comes to our
ice-cream, and that Joey Naylor, that is the defintion of liberty.

Joey Naylor: But that's not what we're talking about

Nick Naylor: Ah! But that's what I'm talking about.

Joey Naylor: ...but you didn't prove that vanilla was the best...

Nick Naylor: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong
I'm right.

Joey Naylor: But you still didn't convince me

Nick Naylor: It's that I'm not after you. I'm after them.

 _\- Thank You For Smoking_

~~~
mapleoin
I didn't get the last line.

~~~
anigbrowl
'them' = the customers/general public: lowest common denominator vs highest
common factor. This is the basis of all propaganda, and why you should be
happy that trial by jury is a right rather than an obligation.

------
hristov
Wow, I think it says a lot that the MS publicity people have stopped even
trying to make Microsoft look better in comparison to Linux but are trying to
split the camp between Linux and BSD.

As far as the comparison between BSD, it is clear why most people prefer
Linux, it works with more things than BSD.

I think that at least one of Theo's complaints is completely meritless -- that
Linux developers are being exploited in some way. First Linux developers do
their work on their own free will, nobody tricks them or forces them to do the
work. Also, Linux developers are getting treated better than BSD ones, because
Linux has the GPL. So IBM can use the work of Linux developers, but if IBM has
to have something done in house, they cannot keep it closed, they have to
submit their own code to the community just as any Linux developer would.

This of course is very different than BSD where companies like Microsoft and
Apple and Sun routinely take code and use it for their own close sourced
projects.

~~~
apotheon
> Also, Linux developers are getting treated better than BSD ones, because
> Linux has the GPL.

Please prove:

1\. that Linux developers "are getting treated better"

2\. that it's because of the GPL

I'm afraid I don't believe you.

> This of course is very different than BSD where companies like Microsoft and
> Apple and Sun routinely take code and use it for their own close sourced
> projects.

. . . and how Linux developers sometimes do the same thing to BSD code --
except that it's a different kind of "closed", and closed to a different set
of people.

------
psadauskas
_Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is "difficult" and declined to comment
further._

------
Tichy
Is it very ignorant to say that I don't even care? I am not very deep into OS
internals. I want an open source UNIX on my computer. Currently Ubuntu does it
nicely. If there was a BSD distro with a nice GUI and everything, I might use
that instead. I don't really care if it is Linux or BSD under the hood.

~~~
mapleoin
<http://www.pcbsd.org/>

~~~
Tichy
Thing is, I haven't heard much about it. Will it

\- support all my hardware including printers and external monitors?

\- support all file and media formats?

\- have equivalents for all the important software?

I am not much of a pioneer in such things. I prefer others to do the testing.
If I see a significant amount of people using PCBSD without problems, I might
give it a shot. Also I don't have much of an incentive to switch, as Ubuntu
does OK for me.

~~~
apotheon
> Will it

> \- support all my hardware including printers and external monitors?

That depends on what hardware you're using -- just as it does with Ubuntu, MS
Windows, and MacOS X.

> support all file and media formats?

Applications do that -- not operating systems. Installing the win32-codecs
port on FreeBSD (the basis for PC-BSD) works great for me, though.

> have equivalents for all the important software?

You _are_ aware that Linux software generally runs on FreeBSD, right?

. . . and that FreeBSD has a built-in Linux emulation layer you can enable
during installation?

. . . and that the FreeBSD ports system (which PC-BSD can use) has more
software in it than any Linux distribution's software archives other than
Debian?

------
noelchurchill
Written by Dan Lyons, AKA The Fake Steve Jobs www.fakesteve.net

Not that it validates/invalidates the article, but just to keep in mind.

~~~
thaumaturgy
All validation aside, it does explain why that was one of most factually
sparse articles I've ever read.

I can't imagine that Theo is going to take kindly to OS X and Solaris being
cited as "two of the best operating systems in the world" in an article in
which he was extensively quoted.

Theo's personality and opinions aside, I've been a fan of OpenBSD for a long
time, and it really is a solid operating system.

~~~
antonovka
OpenBSD has done a lot of interesting work with networking software over the
past few years, too:

OpenSSH - No explanation required

pf(4) - A fantastic stateful firewall.

CARP/pfsync - Zero downtime automatic router/firewall fail-over.

sasyncd - Zero-downtime failover of IPSec tunnels.

relayd - layer 3/7 pf-integrated load balancer

OpenBGPd, OpenOSPFd - Free BGP/OSPF implementations.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I have a passionate and sordid love affair with pf. :-)

OpenSSH has had some issues in the past, but _everyone_ uses it.

Also, don't forget their recent work with guard pages (I think?) that exposed
heap problems in a bunch of userland software.

------
kevindication
Who hasn't editorialized on whether certain code belongs in its current
location? It's just a note to say that we need to revisit this later and
decide if it should be refactored.

~~~
antonovka
In applications? Sometimes.

The kernel is a different matter. Speaking generally, the BSDs endeavor to not
commit "revisit this later" code to the kernel at all. In the idealized
development approach of the BSDs, it's either done right, fully analyzed for
performance impacts across the usage spectrum, long-term API maintainability,
security, et al, or it's not done.

~~~
billswift
Or at least if they do it, they don't admit it in their comments.

------
anigbrowl
_BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being
that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls._

------
pavlov
This is from 2005, and also not very interesting.

~~~
aurora72
I haven't noticed it at first but that's right, it's really outdated. But
still interesting as it depicts the inner workings of OS OS'es in a lively
manner.

------
windsurfer
Troll troll troll.

------
bsaunder
They almost got the title right:

"Is Linux For Lusers?"

(not that I agree with the content). Pretty much a meaningless rant. Seems
like MS propaganda.

------
paulreiners
The article says, "a Red Hat coder published an essay criticizing IBM's Linux
programmers". Where is this essay published? Is it online somewhere?

------
growt
Made me remember that old slogan: "NetBSD: because Theo is an asshole!"

------
TallGuyShort
This is why I use Linux 2.6: <http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/>

To summarise: Linux 2.6 scaled O(n) on almost every benchmark, and OpenBSD was
called a "real stinker".

~~~
antonovka
6 year old benchmarks? Here's more complete/balanced/nuanced information:
<http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/smp.html>

This sort of thing is complicated, depending on OS, workload, application
design, etc, and your mileage may always vary.

~~~
windsurfer
Somehow I don't think that information could be " _balanced_ " coming from the
_freebsd.org_ domain.

~~~
antonovka
I think that's an unfair judgement of what I've found to be a very high level
of professionalism FreeBSD in general, and Kris Kennaway specifically. Kris is
the author of most of the work there (done as part of his work on performance
improvements in FreeBSD).

~~~
windsurfer
You still can't ask how is BSD from a BSD guy and ever expect negative
results...

~~~
antonovka
Why not?

~~~
windsurfer
Well, I mean, it's like asking a coffee drinker what they think of coffee.

~~~
antonovka
No, it's like asking a coffee producer what he thinks of his competitor's
coffee. If he's a professional, he'll give you an honest opinion.

You don't think the FreeBSD kernel engineers are capable and willing to
objectively evaluate other software implementations?

~~~
windsurfer
But he's being biased when he inevitably says "Mine's better".

~~~
apotheon
So . . . the only way someone can be "unbaised" in your view is to say "What I
use sucks."

------
talleyrand
"Unlike Linux, which is a clone of Unix,"

False.

~~~
wglb
Please elucidate.

~~~
thyrsus
At one point Red Hat paid to get one of their releases "officially" tested as
conforming to the POSIX standard, and passed, and was thus able to officially
call that version of Linux "Unix(TM)". I may be mistaken, but I haven't heard
them pushing that any time recently, and the market doesn't seem to care, so I
doubt they've continued jumping through that hoop.

Now, if you want to take a deeper interpretation of the analogy of "clone", as
in duplicate DNA, then Linux is less of a clone of "Unix" than BSD, since it
was independently written, and a judge has pretty much declared that it
contains no copyrighted content that originated with "Unix". Read the SCO
travesty timeline at groklaw.com. Meanwhile, the Berkeley (Berkeley Standard
Distribution - BSD) folks actually worked from a copy of the original Bell
Labs Unix - but worked so hard on it that in a much earlier court case, a
judge made a (sealed) declaration that BSD had only a handful of lines left
from the original code, and that Berkeley could distribute their work, with
the exception of that handful, on their own terms. Berkeley quickly
replaced/removed any infringing content, and that became the basis for the
*BSDs.

For the glorious history of Unix, read Peter Salus's "A Quarter Century of
Unix".

~~~
apotheon
> was thus able to officially call that version of Linux "UNIX(TM)"

FTFY

Being "UNIX" is about passing tests and paying money. Being "Unix" is about
the ancestry of the code and the design philosophy. Being "a Unix clone"
happens where the ancestry of the code diverges.

That's the way most of us who know something about the subject use the terms.
If it is actually an exact duplicate of the original code, we tend to call
that a "copy" -- not a "clone". For instance, "I have a copy of AT&T Unix at
home."

------
c00p3r
Linux is not an OS, it is a gold rush, while OpenBSD is just an OS.

btw, there are very important contributions from OpenBSD's team - openssh and
pf (primary IP packet filter imported into FreeBSD).

FreeBSD itself is an example of very successful "niched" UNIX-like system -
think about network interface's performance, removal of GKL from most used
device drivers, SMP-aware scheduler and memory manager, kqueue, netgraph
subsystems and so on.

OpenBSD is a great toy for hobbyist to resurrect some ancient SUN's 1U Netra
server as firewall and proxy for home or very small business. I have several
of them for pleasure and enjoyment. And of course it is a very good choice for
some low-power single-core single-CPU system without heavy pthreads.

My opinion it cannot be compared to the "open source business ecosystem" that
Linux[based systems] became.

~~~
apotheon
Wow . . . Linux must be ready for the Enterprise, because the Enterprise
buzzwords are being used to tout Linux superiority now.

------
beret
openBSD Slogan: NO REMOTE ROOT EXPLOITS IN THE DEFAULT INSTALL IN THE PAST SIX
MONTHS AS FAR AS WE KNOW

