Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 12:28:51 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Thanks guys Message-ID: <028701c28b07$d8036bd0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <20021113055636.76357.qmail@web21305.mail.yahoo.com> <1037168694.263.3.camel@asa.gascom.net.ru> <000e01c28af3$35060c30$1baccecd@donatev49iknkl> <20021113104844.GA1869@raggedclown.net>
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Cliff writes: > Ok, 20 flavours of Linux and at least 3 of > *BSD; well...that's the way it goes... Actually, it's not the number of versions that exist that is important, it's the degree of similarity among them. Twenty operating systems that are 98% compatible is much less of a problem than two operating systems that are only 5% compatible. Something that runs in an X environment on one version of UNIX will often run on several other versions of UNIX as well, but a program that runs on Windows will not run at all on the Mac without being rewritten. > All OS'es should be Open-Sourced..especially in these > dangerous days ! A nice wish, but developing operating systems costs an incredible amount of money, and the money has to come from somewhere, and the easiest way to raise the money is by making the OS proprietary and selling it. Open operating systems are nice when they exist, but since nobody has the resources to support them in a totally reliable and responsive way, choosing them for mission-critical applications is risky, unless one has on-site experts to maintain them if required. For many other purposes, they might be quite suitable, however. In the olden days, mainframe vendors would sell the hardware and almost throw in the OS as an afterthought, since the hardware was useless without the OS, and since the OS couldn't be used on any other hardware. They'd even provide source code so that customers could modify the OS. It worked well, but that is not a a viable model for smaller systems, because it makes it easy to take a proprietary OS and use it on different but compatible hardware (much harder for Macs than for Windows or UNIX, though). Also, customer modifications were a nightmare for support organizations--and that would be a million times worse with smaller systems, given that there are so many people of limited skill and high motivation tweaking so many smaller systems. > Mind you I am not sure how many volunteers there > would be who would wish to wade through what is > rumoured to be 30 million lines of code that > constitute Windows2000. Exactly. Writing an OS like that costs several billion dollars, and supporting it costs millions more. How would you find the money for open-source code? Then again, one might argue that 30 million lines is too much for an OS (and I tend to agree), but that's a separate issue. One nice thing about UNIX--in part because of its history, I suppose, and in part because it is largely open-source--is that it doesn't suffer from the extreme bloat of Windows or Mac operating systems. This applies only to the OS itself, though, not to bloated GUI environments that might run on top of it, which seem to have the same problem as Windows and the Mac. > Well I think it's jolly good as well :) So do I. FreeBSD is a great operating system. Simple, performant, secure, reliable, accessible, and free. It would be nice to see a desktop OS with the same characteristics one day, but for various reasons, I question whether that will ever even be possible. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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