Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice [LWN.net]

Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

Posted May 10, 2012 7:57 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice by cmccabe
Parent article: Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)

Just the first paragraph mentions two competitors, "gnu" (which would later become Hurd) and Minix, by Andrew Tannenbaum.

Let's have a look at those »competitors«:

GNU: Not ready. (In point of fact, twenty years have passed and it still isn't ready.) Also, »cathedral« development style. Boo.
Minix: At the time AST was on record as not being interested in adding features that would make Minix a serious (as opposed to »toy«) operating system, such as virtual memory. Boo.
BSD: Was available but not free (the AT&T lawsuit was still around). Boo.

So what's a hacker to do?

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Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

Posted May 11, 2012 1:04 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Linus had a different philosophy than GNU Hurd and Minix. So it was entirely appropriate that he create his own project to express that philosophy.

Similarly, ngnix has a different philosophy than the apache web server (raw speed vs. features). Xfce has a different philosophy than GNOME3. And so on, and so forth. Debian focuses on different goals than Red Hat, or Slackware. Dismissing all of this as undesirable "fragmentation" is just stupid, and that's my whole point.