Comment by sennight
5 years ago
> In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again.
Seems apropos to me, given the fact that a Linux ABI compatible hobby project is under discussion - and that everyone here is familiar with the famous Usenet announcement.
> The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when...
I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. Fractured in a way that was meaningful - not like today where you can spin up a VM and be productive in short order, thanks to the significant lack of distinguishing difference. That is the really interesting thing about these hobby projects - they introduce possibilities that are either completely ignored by organizations suffering from inertia constraints, or can't be mimicked because they're diametrically opposed to present designs.
> I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured.
There is way more competition now:
This isn't even an exhaustive list of UNIX-like platforms that are new since Linux and free.
Don't conflate standardisation of the industry with a lack of options. More options do exist today and are in use (eg some games consoles run FreeBSD, Netflix uses BSD, Nexenta is used in some enterprise storage solutions, Darwin may not be used in any free capacity but macOS is clearly used heavily by HN readers, and so on and so forth).
Moreover, I've used FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Nexenta and OpenBSD on production systems over the last 10 years (and the list gets more esoteric if we look past 10 years). So just because you might exist in a Linux-only ecosystem it doesn't mean that's the case for the entire IT industry.
Odd, you purportedly know the difference between an OS and a distro - but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? And to a degree that is no different from Netware vs OS/2?! Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment.
> So just because you might exist in a Linux-only...
Obnoxiously presumptuous.
> but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list.
lol it's not nonsense. Every item I've listed offers something unique.
> Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another?
Actually the differences in the Illumos derivatives are quite fundamental:
- Nexentra is aimed at being an enterprise storage solution with Debian user land. That's massively unlike Illumos
- Smart OS is designed to be a smarter virtualisation and containerisation host OS. It even bundles Linux's KVM virtualization. It's not intended to be run as a desktop platform
- OpenIndiana and Illumos are probably the most similar, however OpenIndiana aims to be more true to OpenSolaris while Illumos aims to be more of a hybrid upstream. So while they're both multi-paradigm (like how Debian can be a desktop or server OS) there are some major differences in their commit tree.
Honest question: how close are you to the Illumos projects? Or are you just an outsider looking in and making assumptions about equivalence based on your experience with Linux? I ask because Illumos forks are much more akin to BSD forks than they are Linux distros.
> Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment.
Even if you want to pare down the list to upstreams, you still have half a dozen BSDs (I really hope you at least have enough experience with BSD to realise these aren't just respins like Linux distros), Illumos, Minix, and Darwin. Verses your point in the 90s which was basically non-free BSD, non-free SysV, non-free QNX, non-free Minix etc....you still have those options now PLUS the ones I've listed.
This is the problem with your argument. You're assuming the old choices have gone away, which they haven't...well, apart from SCO and Minix is now free. And in addition we have dozens of interesting new platforms, some of which I've exampled, too.
There's no way on Earth we have less choice now than in the 90s. We might have the industry largely standardising on a subset but that's an entirely different argument and it's only representative of the lowest common denominator doing common problems. However if you look slightly outside of the status quo and you'd see there is a lot of variety still happening in the industry. I know this first hand too -- as I've said in my previous post, I've worked in plenty of places that weren't just Linux shops :)
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