Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:53:42 -0700 From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org> To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>, Francisco Reyes <reyesf@newsguy.com> Cc: <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD advocacy Message-ID: <19980730072207.17695.qmail@hyperreal.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980729225930.15784A-100000@s8-37-26.student. washington.edu> References: <199807300224.TAA25928@newsguy.com>
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At 11:08 PM 7/29/98 +0000, Jason C. Wells wrote: >The BSD's already share some things. The ports mechanisms and CVS are >common. I have seen beaucoup references to other BSD's in various sources >and make files. > >I think some of OpenBSD's security measures are novel. I know enough about >crypto to probably enjoy OpenBSD. Maybe on day FreeBSD can incorporate >their ideas. Thought experiment: what would the world be like if instead of just one company producing an OS that supported the "Win32 APIs", you had three, each doing development independently, but coordinating the API's in the name of interoperability? Well, so long as the competitors each sold value on top of the base product (thus removing the need to make too many proprietary API's) then we'd have real competition in the OS space. I bet there'd be fewer bugs, more stability, and much lower prices, no "undocumented" API calls, and honest to god *innovation*. You'd also have some customization; one OS might be better at providing a total locked-down system, another might be better for serving files and applications, and yet another might be more adept at running on various hardware. So long as the API's were consistant the "balkanization" factor would be mitigated. Lo, and behold, that's what we have here in *BSD land. And this is not a bad thing; having one OS for an audience of millions means having to make decisions that make everyone happy, and it's a lot easier for 3 teams to each make 3 million people happy than one team to make all 9 million happy. Again, so long as the API's stay as consistant as possible, it really doesn't matter. Don't make it a chore for an application developer to make their products available over all three (the ports system seems to work well in this regard). Learn from each other - be on each other's CVS commit lists - I know there has been patch sharing between the teams. This is good! Don't get caught up in debates about territory and ego scratching. Interoperability is the key. Brian --=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-- "Common sense is the collection of prejudices | brian@apache.org acquired by the age of eighteen." - Einstein | brian@hyperreal.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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