More DTrace envy

Personally, the DTrace thing looks like a clear case where the Linux development model fell
flat on its face. I first released the Linux Trace Toolkit back in July '99 -- close to 10
years ago now. From very early on I met a tremendous amount of resistance to it,  despite
having made clear that this was made for users (not kernel developers) to understand how their
system behaves. Maybe I didn't do a good job of communicating that view, and, hey, maybe even
the implementation wasn't the best out there (though the record would show that implementation
quality was hardly a reason for refusing to merge the code), but it remains that interest in
kernel tracing for *users* only came to the forefront and remains on the forefront for one
simple reason: the existence of DTrace. And that, it seems to me, is the wrong reason for
things to happen. If Linux (kernel and system) is to lead the pack in what it delivers to its
users, it must be able to give  functionality to users that other OSes can't. But as the
recent "Ubuntu girlfriend experiment" has shown, we're still trailing other OSes (DTrace is
but a symptom) and that needs to change.