Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

Thanks for this, interesting point of view.

I somewhat feel git might actually a good example of commoditization. I followed this very much in "real-time" as the BitKeeper drama unfolded and was at OLS in 2005 when Matt Mackall first presented Mercurial -- I loved mercurial btw, and I was sad to see git prevail, but I digress. It was my understanding that BitKeeper was tailor-built by Larry McVoy for Linux development based on direct conversations between Linus and Larry. I don't have a reference for this, so I could be misremembering, but that was my understanding. As such, when the history section of git on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History) states: "Support a distributed, BitKeeper-like workflow." as one of the goals set out by Linus for git, one can probably easily overlook the work that Larry presumably did to actually and actively listen to Linus and come up with something that fit "the customer's needs". [side bar: I've butted heads with Larry several times in the early 2000s on unrelated topics, but credit should go where it's deserved.]

And maybe this is what it boils down to. "Listening to the customer's needs" and "creating a product the customer will actually use" have nothing to do with the ability of replicating in an open source manor the end result of what those customer-facing steps entail. In fact, I'd venture to say that the open source community generally has had a bad history of being able to listen to customer needs. It's been, on other hand, very effective at replicating what those that have have produced, albeit sometimes in a more sustainable fashion ... because direct monetization wasn't the end goal or even possibly a need.

Again: 1) very rough ideas/arguments off the top of my head, 2) I care not of being right nor making a point. i.e. destroy/demolish at will.