From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 17 11:01:39 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2B4E137B401 for ; Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:01:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 82A3843FA3 for ; Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:01:38 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: from apollo.backplane.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.9/8.12.6) with ESMTP id h6HI1JVI001006; Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:01:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.9/8.12.6/Submit) id h6HI1I7D001005; Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:01:18 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:01:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200307171801.h6HI1I7D001005@apollo.backplane.com> To: Julian Elischer References: cc: Julian Stacey cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Annoucning DragonFly BSD! X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 18:01:39 -0000 :> anyway, not our Latin alphabet ] effort, a dubious idea to divide :> the number of shoulders that load sits on. There's already another :> cross platform ports project anyway (Freshports?) :> - A new distribution mechanism (whatever) ? maybe - but again :> if better, that technology should be adopted & merged into other BSDs. :> :> http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ may be a just a troll erection, it's :> constructed so there's nothing real to see. A troll site ? No :> where to click & sample code inside browser, you'd have to cvsup & :> extract localy to check real code. No interest until others confirm real. : :you missed the entire source tree? look again.. :and I doubt that a troller would have redesigned the entire kernel :to make a troll and made it work.. if he did we should invite him in.. Yes, that would be some trick, considering that the unified diff between my tree and -stable is over 347,000 lines long! Sheesh, I guess I really *do* have to get cvsweb up and running for people to believe it, ftp and cvsup apparently aren't enough! : :it's himm.. believe it.. I don't understand, do some people not believe that I am heavy-weight kernel programmer? I mean, sheesh, this reminds me of my old Commodore PET days, when I wrote a centipede game entirely in 6502 machine language and submitted it to cursor magazine for publication. They declined, I think because they didn't quite believe that a 14 year old kid could *do* that. It was a damn fine game, too, the last level featured an invisible centipede who only turned visible for a few seconds when you hit one of his segments. :> ( Julian Stacey ) :> The logo is useless (& a troll give away ?): Useless! You try staring a three inch long DragonFly in the face for half an hour! It was fate is what it was, that Fred was so photogenic because it took about 20 shots before I got him framed and focused properly and he basically refused to budge despite my comings and goings, only occassionally startling, flitting around the yard a bit, and then landing right smack back on the same frond he had just taken off from. :> There's too many BSD's already. More complete BSDs aren't of :> personal or business benefit. More kernels, tools, & experiments :> in ports/packaging etc could be useful though, but to be of most :> benefit such work should be fully integratable, & not further split :> the available BSD workforce. :> Julian Stacey Freelance Systems Engineer, Unix & Net Consultant, Munich. : :Well if you take away his commit bit treeat him unfairly, what other :choice does he have? Well, I don't really care about that, but this points to an interesting dichotomy in the perception of people who use open source and of people who write it. I don't know about other open source programmers but my motivation is interest and invention. It has nothing at all to do with towing some imaginary line. Why should it matter what operating system base I choose? If Linus felt that way he would never have started Linux. It is a concept that non-programmers like to banter about on forums like slashdot but it is utterly meaningless to most of the people that do the actual programming. There is responsibility, yes, but it is an effect rather then a cause. History is filled with underdogs winning against the behemoths against all apparent odds, and turning into behemoths themselves only to be displaced by the next underdog when their little clique starts believing in its own immortality. As a programmer who has gone through several generations of operating environments I don't believe in the immortality of anything, least of all FreeBSD or Linux, or my own code. But it doesn't stop me from working my favorite project on my favorite platform, whatever that happens to be. Ultimately the only thing that survives history is the invention and the concept, and memory. If people can see that a concept works and go and implement it in their own favorite environment then that counts as a success and another notch on my sleave regardless of anything else. If people can make positive use from something I've done, that's a nother notch. It's amazing to me how people can belittle the work that Rik has done on the Linux VM system, for example, under the misconception that not having outright adoption means that it was somehow a failure. How absurd! That work created a competitive environment which had the direct result of several people building upon the concepts and implementating something far better then what used to be there. That's a notch in Rik's sleave, and in mine too for having been able to contribute to the discussion. It's amazing to me how many old Amiga users have emailed me in the last two days about DICE. DICE is a C compiler I wrote for the Amiga. In modern day terms it is consigned to history now, having outlived the platform it was originally designed for (the Amiga, though there are people who still use it to support legacy 68000 based hardware). What is amazing to me are the stories from people who got their start in programming using that compiler, and have gone on to great jobs and interesting work in later years. *THAT* is what I care about. I don't care a whit about what happens to the actual code because I know it won't last. I've written a huge amount of code in my life and 95% of it is no longer being actively used. That same 95%, however, has effected the lives of thousands of people in a positive fashion so the idea that code must somehow become immortal or its a wasted effort is just absurd. Open source is the ultimate expression of Darwinism, and evolution takes many forms, but one thing is for certain: There is no such thing as immortality for Linux, FreeBSD, or anything else for that matter. -Matt Matthew Dillon