Crowding out OpenBSD [LWN.net]

Crowding out OpenBSD

Posted Nov 16, 2012 14:42 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Crowding out OpenBSD by dlang
Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD

"Those who didn't learn from PentiumPro are doomed to Itanium"...

The "baggage" of keeping old stuff running well is vital for the fledgeling operating system/architecture/whatever. If it isn't there, it won't ever make it to enough popularity to stand on its own.

You'd be surprised at the proportion of shops still running ancient software, often on heroic life support measures. One of the funnier stories from IBM's early days was a machine running an emulator for an older model, under which an emulator for a still older machine ran, just to keep some program from the dawn of computing available. And I remember somewhere where they had a more than 15 year old PL/1 program, to which the source code had been long lost. Their most valuable asset was an old hand, who knew the innards of the code enough to be able to tweak it by patching the executable.

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Crowding out OpenBSD

Posted Nov 22, 2012 22:04 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Indeed, I see this "We will succeed because we lack useless baggage" attitude all the time from little hobbyist systems. It's the same mistake as when someone observes that most MS Office users are using only a small fraction of its features and then mistakenly concludes that a program which implements a small fraction of MS Office's features is adequate for most MS Office users. It would only be true if they all sought the /same/ features but of course everybody is different.

It only takes _one_ missing requirement to rule out your system. It will take hundreds, even thousands of features to "bloat" the system enough to make a measurable difference.

Some people seem to have created a folk history of Linux in which Linus Torvalds slays the bloated dinosaurs of Traditional Unix with his simpler, lightweight OS. In reality from the outset people's gripe about Linux was that it lacked features they wanted, and that's where a lot of early development (and the occasional famous name) comes into the picture. Nobody was shouting "Hooray Linux doesn't have over-complicated PAM", they were shouting "Hooray Linux runs on these incredibly cheap i486 based PCs we got for half the price of an entry-level Sun clone, what a shame it doesn't have PAM, I wonder if we can fix that somehow".