Linus Torvalds Receives IEEE Computer Pioneer Award 141
mikejuk (1801200) writes "Linus Torvalds, the 'man who invented Linux' is the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award, '[f]or pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach.' According to Wikipedia, Torvalds had wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of 'free,' 'freak,' and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server it was first hosted for download, named Torvalds' directory linux. In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution — but as it dates from 2005 it is outside the remit of the IEEE Computer Pioneer award."
Totaly support this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. Congrats man! \o/
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Why? He's got the name recognition, but he wasn't the first to develop an open source kernel. The UCB team had been doing that before and so had the FSF (although with less success). He was the first to release an open source UNIX kernel for i386, but only by a few months. I may be wrong, but I believe OpenBSD was first to use a public CVS repository, rather than exchanging diffs on a mailing list.
This award feels like pandering. He gets the award for being the figure who is well known for doing thi
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He gets the award for successfully doing things that lots of other people were doing. BSDs didn't have the level of compatibility of Linuxes and fell behind on hardware support almost immediately. They offered a good free x86 based Linux, but arguably one that was worse than SCO. Linux redefined Unix.
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Git can be seen as his more important contribution (Score:5, Insightful)
"Git can be seen as his more important contribution"
Umm no. The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux? It changed the world! The same can't quite be said about Git (although great in its domain).
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No shit. An operating system that changed the world, vs. a versioned source control system that makes certain administrative tasks easier. I feel sad for anyone who doesn't have the sense of history or proportion to put these endeavors in their proper place.
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No shit. An operating system that changed the world,
...by being the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech (and not under legal threat from AT&T) Unix-compatible OS.
vs. a versioned source control system that makes certain administrative tasks easier.
...and that was most definitely not the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech version control system capable of over-the-network access (and not, as far as I know, even the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech distributed version control system).
(And it makes some things harder if you're "holding it wrong", but I digress.)
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Guy I have to tell you I think the legal threat is a BS excuse the BSD people have been pushing for a generation. The difference was one of attitude towards new users and recruitment. The BSD people never even aimed for the average Windows poweruser to be able to switch over.
Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut (Score:5, Insightful)
We should not diminish the importance of Linux. But it's clear that Git is much more important today. Linux is wonderful, but its a commodity for most people. It doesn't matter that Android is based on Linux. It's awesome but most people don't care. It's just a technicality.
It's "just a technicality" in the sense that Android might not exist if Linux hadn't existed; saying that it's less relevant because people don't know it's there is like saying that ARM isn't all that important because most people don't know they have ARM processors in their smartphones. Git is even less directly relevant to most people, as they're not developers.
What Linus did by creating GitHub is of tremendously much more importance if you look at how well it brings open source developers together.
Presumably you meant "by creating Git"; as far as I know, he no more created GitHub than he created Android, even if GitHub uses Git and Android uses Linux.
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We should not diminish the importance of Linux. But it's clear that Git is much more important today.
Bullshit. If Git vanished overnight, we'd at least have Mercurial. There is no such drop-in replacement for Linux. (I'm not digging on FreeBSD/OpenSolaris/etc, but Linux completely dominates them in real-world deployments.)
Also, Linux was a much more disruptive development. A real working kernel for a real working Unix-like OS, that's free and open source, was/is a huge deal. Git is awesome, but there's no question that Torvalds' work on Linux is more award-worthy.
Lastly, in terms of sheer scale/ambitiousne
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Its not a technicality at all. You're thinking marketing not reality.
That's like saying clothing being made of cotton is a technicality and cotton isn't important.
The fact that Linux exists allows for a lot of other things to exist that you wouldn't have otherwise, even though the average person is unaware of it.
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In their proper place, you say?
git rebase -i
Thank me later.
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Plus, git was only really the most popular of many darcs copies. We wouldn't really be any further back without it. If anything, further forward, because darcs gets the semantics of a DSCM more right (and doesn't need hacks like rebasing).
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I wsa a fan of Darcs. I used it a fair bit, but it was just a little bit flakey. Sometimes it would eat all memory and crash, occasionally leaveing the old history corrupted.
I love the theory of patches and the excellent cherry picking and the way it works with bisection. But, day to day I prefer git.
Mercurial is fine too, I think, but I haven't used it enough to make a solid judgement call.
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Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut (Score:4, Insightful)
Git is really a gift from BitKeeper. If BitKeeper had chosen to not be dicks, everybody would still be using it for Linux kernel development. Hell, BitKeeper doesn't even put pricing information on their web site, you need to 'request' it [but you know it ain't cheap if they say it costs $$$ from a range of zero $ to $$$$].
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If BitKeeper had chosen to not be dicks
I see you haven't met Larry McVoy.
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I really don't get Git. I've looked at it a few times, and it seems much less intuitive to me than Subversion was when I learned it. I could see it being good for really, really large projects, like Linux, but non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler I can't help but think they're better choices than Git for most projects. Maybe someone could specify, for a project with =20 people on it, what's so great about Git?
Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bite :-)
I used csv and subversion back in the day, switched to hg, and now switched to git. I manage a smallish project with 5 or so contributors and contribute to some other projects.
Git/hg vs csv/svn is all about distributed vs centralized. With git/hg, you learn to love branching and merging, and commit as often as needed.
Git vs hg is more subtle, but I am strongly in the git camp now.
In my perception, hg et al are about lines of code. You contribute code and the code is checked in. git is all about commits. Your work is in commits, and commits can be rebased, squashed, amended, etc until they are just right to express your contribution. Git is not so much about communicating with yourself about how you got to your code; git is about communicating to the rest of the team what you are contributing. In a sense, you are not (just) writing code, you are writing a commit history.
That said, what I miss in git is the "version history" of commits. I would like to see some sort of "is-based-on" link between the 'final' commit and the commits it is amended, rebased, and/or squashed from. I would love to be able to 'expand' a final commit to see the history that went into it, because now you are sometimes choosing between commit elegance and keeping track of development history (aka in the choice to amend a silly type you choose elegance; in the choice to -no-ff merge a branch you choose history).
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I love git and use it everyday, but I'm not sure I understand 5% of it.
That said, I think https://www.kernel.org/pub/sof... [kernel.org] could help you.
git rev-list --all --pretty=oneline
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You're not alone. Git is great, but has a terrible interface. I know many respectable and intelligent software engineers who find the interface difficult. It goes beyond RTFM. OTOH, SVN has an amazing interface. Very well thought out. I think SVN would be just as great as git if not better if it added in some of Git's features.
What's cool about git?
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> The stash/shelve feature is sorely missing from SVN.
Am I missing something here? I'm not understanding why you couldn't just make a new branch?
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I guess that's a reasonable response. It fits in with the notion that SVN stores much more information in the actual repository. In practice, there are a few issues, however.
In a controlled (read: corporate) environment, the architect or lead or integration person may feel ownership over the repository, and, therefore, resist the excess creation of personal branches. In any environment, it can create a lot of clutter in the repo which leads to cognitive noise. Branches will be merged back in, potentially le
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non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler
I find quite the opposite. The simplest case is one user, and a "distributed" VCS is clearly the easiest option in that case--no central repository needed, no environment variables to set, or separate paths to worry about. Just say "init", and you're off and running. (At least with Mercurial or Git, the two DVCSes I have experience with.)
With more than one user, it's slightly more complicated, but not enough to worry about. It all boils down to the distinction between "save this change" and "share my change
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what's so great about Git?
Before git, it was possible to fetch a simple source tree! Now, the user is forced to download history if nobody makes a simple tarball available. This is a massive improvement somehow!
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"Git can be seen as his more important contribution"
Umm no. The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux?
With i386BSD most likely. The main advantage of Linux as a kernel was that it was only a kernel and so using GNU with it did not leave you with an unsupported system.
Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
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Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
Alternative history is always a wild guess, but it's unlikely nothing would have happened for 20+ years. Maybe one of the BSDs, maybe an EGCS-style fork from HURD or an entirely different project would have filled some of the void. I doubt any of them could have taken it quite as far as Linus has though, with Android I assume Linux is the world's most popular OS kernel by number of devices.
Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut (Score:4, Funny)
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off.
We're not still waiting for the Hurd to take off?
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Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath...
386BSD (Score:1)
Linux was originally released in November of 1991. 386BSD was released in March of 1992.
So where would we be? At the worst about 4 months behind, but probably ahead because 386BSD was substantially more complete when it came out than Linux would be for several years.
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The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux?
1991, when Linux was released, was indeed the dark days. The i386 port of BSD was delayed by legal uncertainty over the AT&T vs UCB lawsuit. When UCB resoundingly won, 386BSD was released and was a vastly more mature system than Linux. Today, Linux and FreeBSD aren't that different in terms of performance or support. Debian kFreeBSD works quite happily with a glibc ported to FreeBSD and runs most of the same applications as Debian Linux. Linux still lacks some things (kernel sound mixing, ZFS, DTra
Git? (Score:5, Insightful)
Git is a nice tool, but it's not even close to his work on Linux. Orders of magnitude less important. You'd be paying for commercial licenses of Solaris, GNU would have seen far less of an audience and not progressed nearly as fast as it has, and you'd be paying VMware license fees every time you started up an EC2 instance. If Git disappeared tomorrow, I'd switch to svn and probably grumble a couple more times than normal. If Linux disappeared tomorrow, I'd be bankrupt and broke.
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I would say Git is virtually indispensable in development, or at least some form of version control, at this point.
Given that many projects don't use Git, I would not even come close to saying that Git is virtually indispensable in development (unless "virtually" means "not" or otherwise renders the adjective to which it refers meaningless).
I would say that some form of version control is important, but there were plenty of free-software version control systems, supporting over-the-Internet access, available before Git came along, so you can't give credit to Git for that.
I'd love to know the reasons that lead some to
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I'm with you on that it isn't even close to Git vs. Linux. But...
The reason for seeing Git as important is that Git was the first free version control system to resolve the performance issues with distributed version control. The combination of free and fast allowing distributed version control to effective in practice for large / complex projects. It moved distributed version version control from a really cool theoretical idea to a practice. The people who had been working in distributed version contro
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Besides Git we have Mercurial and Bazaar. All born around the same time so solve the same problem.
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Besides Git we have Mercurial and Bazaar. All born around the same time so solve the same problem.
I don't know about Mercurial, but have you ever used Bazaar? While Git is written in C, Bazaar is apparently written in Python, and it's even slower than that implies.
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More likely we would all be using some variant of BSD instead. But still, Linux is far greater than GIT. The list of alternatives to GIT is long.
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If Git disappeared tomorrow, I'd switch to svn and probably grumble a couple more times than normal.
If git disappeared wouldn't you just use Mercurial?
dear linus (Score:2)
who is git, and to what is s/he objecting?
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Talk about damning with faint praise.
Re:Good (I guess) (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't help feeling that Linux, while extraordinarily powerful, has less relavance now than it did 10 years ago.
Surely you are joking. Not only did it dethrone nearly all UNIXes used for server side tasks, is used in nearly all Top500 supercomputers, but it is ubiquitous on Android mobile platforms as well. If this is not success what is?
The desktop needs to be thought over again.
Re:Good (I guess) (Score:4, Insightful)
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In a sense, you are correct. I am referring to more than the kernel when I say 'Linux'. Acknowledged, there is wide disagreement about that.
I'm referring to 'Linux' as the core of an alternative to the Mac OS/OS X/DOS/Windows 9.x/Windows NT/BeOS systems that have locked the vast majority of computer users in to a licensed platform for most of personal computing history. It's not happening, and that saddens me.
I've been around Linux a long time. It's powerful. It's alternately the only way to accomplish
No. Linux has more relevance, (Score:3)
just far less visibility.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however
Re:No. Linux has more relevance, (Score:4)
Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux.
Or BSD.
Re:No. Linux has more relevance, (Score:4, Interesting)
just far less visibility.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
There's also a matter of sheer inertia in terms of consumer software availability. That's less of a concern with, say, internet infrastructure. Like it or not, DOS captured a large portion of the home and business market early, and Windows leveraged that success and built up a massive amount of inertia among home users. There was a critical period where commercial operating systems, for all their technical shortcomings, were vastly simpler to use than Linux was. I remember experimenting with Linux around '95 or so, and remembering it didn't compare all that favorably to Windows 95. To me, it seemed like it was really only a benefit for people who already knew and were comfortable with Unix, and wanted that environment for their PCs.
Modern Linux desktops are pretty solid (better than Windows 8, certainly), but I'm not certain the real problem is usability. Windows runs nearly all computer games, most business software, and a massive assortment of other commercial products. For people who don't have particular Windows compatibility needs, they can choose the premium Mac hardware/software package, and it provides nearly everything a typical home user would want to start with, and is generally a bit friendlier to use than both Windows and Linux.
That leaves Linux in an uncomfortably position on the desktop, which is unfortunate, because it's come so far and has a lot to offer. It just never got critical mass like DOS/Windows, or had the financial backing of companies like Apple to push it as an alternative OS with it's own ecosystem. At this point, for the average user, Linux really has little to offer them, other than being free and more secure.
An OS's only real purpose in life is to run software. If the software you want to run is only available on Windows, then it's really only a question of whether the price is enough to drive users to another market (assuming no ideological reasons), and for a few hundred dollars spent every five years or so, the answer is pretty obvious. I think the reason for Linux's lackluster desktop adoption is probably as simple as that. And of course, the fact that its already small share is splintered into dozens of distros probably isn't doing it's overall adoption any favors, even if it's great for the enthusiasts.
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just far less visibility.
[...]The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
Social scientist here. I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for linux. My desktops run linux, my servers run linux, the cloud services I use without a doubt run linux (not even talking about the architecture between my computer and those cloud computers), and even my frigging phone runs linux.
The complete "scientific toolchain" or scipy/R/sweave/latex (+github/travis) is now free and open source. This is great because it saves a bit of money, but what it really does is enable you to inspect, modify, cop
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I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for linux.
Probably run FreeBSD, or one of the other *BSDs.
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From the KDE 1.0b3 Announcement: (Score:3)
"Supported platforms: KDE was primarily developed under the GNU/Linux variant of the Unix operating system. However it is known to compile without, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants. At the moment we explicitely support GNU/Linux (Intel , Alpha, Sparc) and Solaris (Sparc) and we have success reports for..."
There are a lot of people here that clearly weren't deeply involved either in serious (non-home) computing or Linux during the era in which Linux was introduced and had its biggest impact
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How is it worse on the Desktop? My 60 year old Mother has zero issues using Xubuntu and she is completely Computer Illiterate, seriously, she barely knows where the power button is. It's all point and click now and package installation is as easy as a Windows exe. Has it really been THAT long since all you guys used Linux?
This "Difficult to use" and "Not ready" nonsense needs to stop. It's false to the extreme.
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How is it worse on the Desktop? My 60 year old Mother has zero issues using Xubuntu and she is completely Computer Illiterate, seriously, she barely knows where the power button is.
The people who keep claiming how difficult Linux is are either folks who:
tried it maybe in 1997
Just parroting something they heard from someone (lame)
Actually less computer literate than your dear Grams (pretty sad for people on a tech site)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
Here's a little list for folks who can't be bothered to follow the link:
LinuxHas been ported to more platforms than any other OS Leading OS on servers and mainframes
Most of the worlds supercomputers and all of the fastest
Git? When Linux hit the scene, (Score:5, Informative)
there _was_ no free operating system for industry standard hardware, much less a Unix-like one, and the commercial offerings were all platform-specific.
If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:
- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account
- This meant either $tens of thousands for current workstation hardware or $thousands for last-cycle hardware if it was even available at all (university and government surplus lots were the primary suspects)
- Phone up the one or two providers that offered OSes for the system
- Shell out $many thousands for a license (and often $thousands more for media)
- In many cases, because non-current hardware was tied to non-current OSes no longer for sale, port the current tree yourself to the non-current hardware after spending the $thousands you spent for a license
In short, it was substantively impossible for—say—a small company, a startup, or a CS/CE student to get their hands on anything beyond a DOS box with Windows 3 on it. With money and time, they MIGHT get web BROWSING working on Windows 3—in unstable ways. Developing software was a nightmare on these DOS/Win3 boxes as well—compilers were expensive, proprietary, and often required runtimes that had to be licensed on a per-user basis (i.e. you spent $200 on the compiler that spoke a non-standard dialect, then if you wanted to sell what you created, you spent another $some amount per copy sold) and that had no hooks for anything network-ish, because there were no standards in the DOS ecosystem for that.
Linux changed everything. Suddenly, you could pick up commodity i386 hardware and actually do network stuff with it in Unix-y ways. Even in the early days when Linux was unstable, incomplete, and a bear to install/configure, it made things possible for small shops or independent developers/creators that had simply been prohibitive in every practical way just a year earlier.
As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.
Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.
Much more than the work by Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds invented the future that we live in.
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Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize
It would most likely look like AOL and BBS.
There are more things in heaven and on earth (Score:2)
than the desktop computing userlands you're thinking of. (With apologies to Shakespeare.)
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> Linux is basically never distributed without a GNU userland
Except for the few million times when it is [wikipedia.org] you mean?
(And before you say, "that's not Linux," if you're not talking about the GNU userland, you're talking about the kernel. And Android most definitely is a distribution of the Linux kernel)
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I think you're greatly overstating the importance of Linux there. Not to take away from the great work Linus did and continues to do, but he himself said: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Source: http://gondwanaland.com/meta/h... [gondwanaland.com]
Re:Git? When Linux hit the scene, (Score:5, Informative)
If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:
- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account
Sorry, but your history is a bit off and overstates the relative impact of Linux at the time. There were actually quite a few real Unix and Unix-like operating systems available in the 80s to early 90s that ran on X86 hardware such as desktop PCs. The prices ranged from pretty cheap to expensive but still much more affordable than proprietary Unix workstations. Some examples include Coherent, PC/IX, AIX, Dell Unix, Rockport Unix, USL UnixWare, Interactive Unix, Xenix, Venix, SCO Unix, Minix, Xinu, Idris, and a number of others. On the Macintosh there was at least A/UX, several different BSD Unix releases, Idris, and MachTen. The Lisa had Xenix. We'll skip over the Amiga and Atari ST series which also had Unix or Unix-like things on them.
Coherent [wikipedia.org]
In the early years of its existence, MWC received a visit from an AT&T delegation looking to determine whether MWC was infringing on AT&T Unix property. The delegation included Dennis Ritchie, who concluded that "it was very hard to believe that Coherent and its basic applications were not created without considerable study of the OS code and details of its applications" and "that looking at various corners [for peculiarities, bugs, etc. that I knew about in the Unix distributions of the time] I couldn't find anything that was copied. It might have been that some parts were written with [AT&T] source nearby, but at least the effort had been made to rewrite. If it came to it, I could never honestly testify [...] that what they generated was irreproducible from the manual."[1]
--------
As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.
Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.
Both the internet and Unix networking were well established before Linux had any real influence, including TCP/IP and Ethernet.
Linux was a great accomplishment, but the BSDs would have done just as well for the role it played. The time gap would only have been about 18 months. Both Linux and the BSDs are really for the most part just reimplementation of Unix work done before. They made Unix technology more widely available to the masses.
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I was supporting SCO Unix in '93, and you are wrong. There was no *nix on PC that could possibly have been considered 'pretty cheap.' SCO was the best of the lot and you were still looking at a couple grand per seat, expect to pay for 'extra'
Re:Git? When Linux hit the scene, (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but I'm right. Coherent was pretty cheap, ~ $100.00. Minix wasn't that pricey either. SCO competitors often undercut them on price and could often run the wide range of commercial software available for it.
For comparison: " Windows NT operating system. Initial version is 3.1. Price is US$495, or US$295 as an upgrade from a previous Windows operating system. - Chronology of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems [pctimeline.info]"
Unix list princes from 1993: [google.com]
Consensys System V:
Base 2 user license - $249
Unlimited users complete package - $1,295
Dell Unix System V R4
Base 2 user license - $495
Unlimited users complete package - $1,295
Interactive Unix
Base 2 user license - $495
Unlimited users complete package - $3,195
SCO Open Desktop
Base 2 user license - $1,295
Unlimited users complete package - $4,290
Univel UnixWare
Base 2 user license - $249
Unlimited users complete package - $2,495
A/UX was a flat cost ( ~ $700 on cdrom) and could support 16 users and came with a fully loaded system including utilities, fortran and C compilers. Licenses to copy were $439. On top of that it could run Macintosh software.
Many of the free and open tools, such as the GNU collection, could run on lots of the commercial releases as well. And that's before considering the UCB code. By '93 the BSDs were entering the scene as well.
And lets not forget the fact that as wonderful as Linux & *BSD were in the early 90s there was little commercial software that ran on them, and even if it did it might not have been cost effective to run things on a PC compared to what a workstation or bigger machine could do.
Re:Git? When Linux hit the scene, (Score:4, Interesting)
A/UX sounded great but it does not belong on this list because it did NOT run on x86 hardware, it ran on a narrow subset of the 68k architecture which was more expensive and much less common, it was never really well supported and Apple abandoned it completely in '95. I've only seen it running on a computer once in my life.
"Many of the free and open tools, such as the GNU collection, could run on lots of the commercial releases as well."
Of course, before Linux that was the only way to run them. But these were not x86 systems that individuals could afford - we are talking about Apollo and Sun and SGI and DEC machines, specialized high performance hardware that was priced accordingly. With few exceptions, people did not own these things - institutions did, and individuals were lucky to get a shell account that would allow them to compile.
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All of those systems were commercially available at the time for the price indicated, so yes there was inexpensive PC Unix out there at the time. Their subsequent fortunes in the marketplace or within their respective companies doesn't change their availability at the time. The Unix market was both highly competitive between companies, and against other offerings. Windows NT took a bit bite out of more than one company with a Unix-centric strategy.
As to "maximum return on minimum investment," why do you
Re:Git? When Linux hit the scene, (Score:4, Interesting)
Fine, I can see how you think you are technically correct here, but this was true in name only. Those systems all sucked very badly, they were 'unix' by some definition but they were not acceptable substitutes for big iron unix in the way that linux quickly became.
"As to "maximum return on minimum investment," why do you think people went after Linux?"
Everyone wants maximum return on minimum investment, of course, but not everyone takes it to unworkable extremes. The other x86 unix vendors did. They got to call it unix by virtue of paying for a license and being authorised forks of the AT&T code, but never invested the resources necessary to get the whole system ported and working properly. Honestly, even SCO was not a passable substitute for proper Unix, it was so rough and full of holes that every day was an adventure, and the other vendors were even worse.
"A/UX ran on hardware from what was the major competitor for X86 hardware"
No, just no. 68k was an entirely different architecture, in a higher price bracket, running entirely different code and competing at a very different tier to the x86 hardware.
"NextStep was also available for X86 at the time."
Spoken like someone that never used it.
I had the immense pleasure of working on a cube at about that time, side by side with HP/UX. Both ran on the big iron that us lowly mortals could not afford, and time-shares were precious. Yes, I know there was an x86 port before NeXT went caput, but how many people actually got a chance to see it run? And just how short was the supported hardware list, hmmm?
Any of these systems, with some time and resources dedicated to them, could have provided a real unix on x86 experience. But none of them did. Not until Linux.
Exactly. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can tell whether or not someone was actually there by whether or not they mention things like "Minix" in a list of viable operating systems.
I was part of a project at the time that needed real networking and a real Unix development environment. We spent four months working to find an alternative, then shelled out for a series of early Sparc pizza boxes. SS2 boxes maybe? As I recall, we got four at nearly $15k each that ate up a huge chunk of our budget.
Two years later, we had liquidated them and were doing all of the same stuff on Linux with cheap 486 boxes and commodity hardware, and using the GNU userland and toolchain. People here talk about GNU as predating Linux while forgetting that prior to Linux, the only place to run it was on your freaking Sparcstation (or equivalent—but certainly not under Minix), which already came with a vendor-supported userland. GNU starts to be interesting exactly when Linux becomes viable.
All in all, the change was bizarrely cool and amazing. We were like kids in a candy store—computing was suddenly so cheap as to almost be free, rather than the single most expensive non-labor cost in a project.
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You can tell someone knows what they are talking about when they assume we all have the exact same techical requirements regardless of what the job is.
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In all fairness a lot of that had to do with hardware. People often forget how much more impressive the x86 environment became between the 286 era and the 486 era. It was the period where the difference between what you got for $40k and what you got for $4k shrunk remarkably from a hardware standpoint. Certainly I give Linux credit, but you may be overstating the case a bit.
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An SGI, SUN, NeXT workstation was around $7k. A PC was around $2k. SCO was generally about $600-1k, and Dell for example had a great OEMed version of SCO. What Linux did was bring the price of having a home Unix down. In particular it made it possible for people who mostly worked professionally on Unix to have a Unix at home. People and certainly companies that wanted a Unix could buy one before Linux.
The rest about commodity hardware is absolutely true. And that's the point. It shifted the price mod
"Man who invented Linux" - nonsense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Linus Torvalds did not "invent" Linux. He implemented a POSIX kernel, working from basic UNIX standards and preexisting hardware (the 80386 MMU). UNIX was an invention. Linux was "just" an implementation. As it grew, there were various inventions going into it. But Linux "as such" was not an invention.
In contrast, Torvalds did basically invent Git. Its shape and functionality, as opposed to what Linux started with, were not predetermined.
Re:"Man who invented Linux" - nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
The most innovative thing with Linux was not that it is a Unix look-a-like. It's that it's a _free software_ Unix look-a-like.
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BSD Unix had a cultural problem.
BSD = appeal to existing Unix administrators looking to run Unix on x86.
Linux = appeal to Windows users. Not successful. But was successful in moving Unix users over to x86 based Unixes until OSX offered a better alternative.
The result was the next generation of admins knew Linux and didn't know BSD.
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I'd simplify and just say that he "implemented" the correct ideals and pieces of otherwise fragmented systems of the day. And that deserves praise because he pulled it off.
Execution is actually difficult.... Look at other projects trying to do the same thing. They have little to no following and haven't overtaken their parent OS (react OS, opensolaris, pleathora of BSDs, and other obscure clones).
Yet Linux was so correctly executed that it OVER TOOK the parent OS that it was essentially taking design cues f
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you know nothing of software development, and so spew ignorant tripe. Linus *invented* software to a specification (a pile of headers and expected behaviors). That is the hard part, any moron can read posix specs (doubtful you could even do that)
Unix had to work on pre-existing hardware too.
LOL @ article (Score:2)
https://drive.google.com/file/... [google.com]
The man has been renamed after his own Frankenste
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...in that most of userland was already available freely for him to use, and BSD's free release was delayed by court cases.
Fortunate, yes, but not "merely" fortunate. Nearly every success story also has a component of being in the right place at the right time, but unless you're talking about lottery winners, there's typically far more "work" than "luck" involved.
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Contracts (Score:2)
I was talking to a friend of mine recently about OpenSSL, and the developers' complaint that they aren't receiving financial or development support from some of the companies that use and benefit most from the software. My point of view is that if you, as a developer, need financial or development support from the users of your software, you need to tell them so. If you don't tell them what support you need in exchange, then you aren't going to get it. The best place for the terms of that agreement is yo
Unspeakable naiveté (Score:4, Insightful)
"In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution" - thus spake someone who was not there in the early 90's, and who takes free software and OS competition for granted. In other words, someone who is naive beyond words.
The change brought by Git is insignificant next to that brought by Linux. Utterly insignificant.
Smart man but what a jerk (Score:1)
I love everything that linus has contributed to the FOSS community and I feel like he would be beloved by all if he weren't so smug about his thoughts always being the best.
A lot of younger people on slashdot these days (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going to say the kids need to leave the lawn, but saying Git can be seen in any way as Torvalds' more important contribution is speaking from ignorance. The people who say there were other OSes that could've filled the same role, but then list off prices for each, are ignorant too.
Linux was free and freely available.
I went from installing it out of the back of a book and from some odd company named Yggdrasil's ftp server, to installing it for a multi-million dollar enterprise fail-over solution.
I went from twiddling values for "drums" to get my hard disks recognized, to it upgrading itself unattended on a phone in my pocket.
Git got to where it was because Torvalds mandated it for Linux contributions. Linux, and the rest of the world, would be fine if Git didn't exist. There were and are plenty of free revision control systems out there. No one can say the same for Linux.
Mixed feelings (Score:2)
Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.
For me, Linux is popular , while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.
a} In technical terms, I know of no
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That in one broken sentence sums up why BSD loses. Linux appealed to the young as platform for them to learn Unix and tried to be cool. BSDs allowed themselves to fall behind terribly then and now.
Linus's real contribution (Score:2)
Linux, evan early in its life, was head and shoulders above the other commonly available OS for the Intel platform (DOS). Its competitors were X
Re: no way (Score:1)
This is one hell of a comprehensive troll. Well done sir: you win the keys to your mother's basement.
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