Date: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 08:20:35 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com> Cc: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Digital, Intel, Silicon Graphics (fwd) Message-ID: <26258.876324035@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 08 Oct 1997 08:00:20 EDT." <199710081200.IAA17975@hda.hda.com>
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> after W98. I'm not sure how much longer it will be feasible for > me to decline to take on primarily Windows projects. Unix - the > Cobol of the next millenium. Well, the overall market is still expanding, so even in the face of declining market share it's still possible for the small fry like us to experience growth. We're not on the cover of The Wall St. Journal, no, but we're hardly declining in number either. > What I wonder is Linux / *BSD nothing but hobbyist low level > background noise such that it is appropriate that it never show up > in any analysis in the major media. Nor do the likes of SCO, Solaris or many of our erstwhile compatriots. I think Unix just doesn't push the right buttons to appeal to the media. It's techie driven and proud of it, standing firmly in its corner of the basketball court and going "you talkin' to us? You guys wanna start somethin'? Well c'mon over here then! No, we're not going over there, you come over here and we'll fight! We ain't movin!" :-) The press needs a bit more stroking than that if you want to get its attention. :) Unix also lost any chance it might have had for "total victory" about 10 years ago, when it Balkanized itself instead of fighting its external threats, so why even worry about that particular lost cause? I still think that we can find some measure of success in turning away from the main axis of the battle and looking for smaller pockets of territory to capture, things which require much higher-tech solutions than Redmond is able to provide. Looking on the bright side, Windows has also soaked up a certain class of user that, frankly, I really don't think that the Unix community ever even really honestly wanted to have. Presenting technology in a way that Ma and Pa Kettle can use it is *hard*, not to mention the tech support involved, and rather than fighting Redmond all these years I almost wonder that we didn't just say "They've got the front-end issues covered and we don't have to deal with those icky users? Fantastic! We'll be left alone to deal with the infrastructure issues then!" rather than getting all up-in-arms over Microsoft. I guess Bill just got so big so fast that everyone else just felt obliged to attack, or something. :) I think that technologies like vxWorks and QNX are doing pretty well for themselves in the embedded systems market, for example, and much of the core technology in Unix could be highly applicable to this same sort of work if some serious attention were paid to structuring it more as a set of pluggable components and providing better real-time capabilities for the people who need that sort of thing. FreeBSD in the recording studio, anyone? :) Seriously - such markets may be comparatively small but they're still enough to keep a fair number of Unix hackers gainfully employed. If you asked me what I thought the real challenge ahead for Unix was, I'd say it was in fulfilling its own original promise, not in trying to become Billy's personal nightmare. We need to take careful stock of the various shortcomings which are standing in the way of Unix's becoming the ultimate engineer's toolbox and solve them. We need to take the best ideas from the embedded OSes, like having dynamically-loadable-everything, a light-weight GUI subsystem, POSIX real-time extensions, etc. and implement them. We need to fix Unix's existing services so that they Just Work and you don't have big warning signs over things like remote file locking which say "out of order" and cause an engineer to mistrust his tools. Make the components easily separable so that it's possible to have only as much "Unix" as you want for a given application. Make it all fast as heck. Play to Unix's existing strengths, basically, and continue to innovate along the same lines that our spiritual forefathers (so to speak) had in mind. I think the original folks were after a really cool toolbox, basically, and they succeeded admirably enough to draw a whole host of other tool-users into what they hardly expected would quickly become a Craftsmen's Cult of sorts. ;-) If we're going to carve out and hold a credible niche for ourselves in Mr. Bill's world, we're going need to get back to the fundamentals and stop thinking about painting a happy face on the outside of the toolbox as much as making the tools inside high quality instruments of software craftsmanship. That's where "commercial UNIX" essentially went down the wrong path, in my opinion. Marketing was brought in without any clear idea as to what it was they were trying to sell and so they kind of looked over their shoulders and tried to sell it like the other guys were selling their OSes. Unfortunately, the "other guys" were Microsoft, IBM and Apple in this case and very bad examples for our impressionable little marketdroids, their requests eventually resulting in the diversion of engineering resources into a battle for the desktop which could not be won and should never have been fought in the first place. They went astray and they paid the price. Anyway, maybe that's our secret weapon. No marketing department. ;-) Jordan
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