Re: [tlug] Unix's 40th Birthday

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > I don't think it was cheaper in the 1980s, given that NetBSD didn't
 > exist. :-)

AT&T licenses weren't that expensive, either, but given that they
needed to rewrite the really hard parts anyway....  I didn't remember
Cisco going that far back, but then in the 1980s Karl Kleinpaste was
managing my network.  "What, me worry?"

 > > ...and does the VPN on only one box that connects through the router.
 > > I don't really consider that box "part of the Internet" in the sense
 > > we're talking about here; it doesn't do any routing.
 > 
 > It certainly does do routing;

Don't be tendentious.  You know damn well I meant handling other
people's packets and forwarding them.  The "inter" part of "Internet",
doncha know.

 > Ah, right, I'm now recalling the details of that book, whatever it was
 > called (the one that discusses hard drives).

"Innovator's Dilemma".  Good book, but if you haven't read it yet, I
recommend the "Innovator's Solution" instead.  It has a better-than-
the-original explanation of most of the content of "Dilemma", plus
additional material on plausible strategies for handling the Dilemma.
No need to read both, though, and f*ckin' Harvard professor
self-satisfaction gets to you after a while.  (Well, me, anyway.)

 > This is why I think that this is possibly a non-disruptive change for
 > MS; they can certainly make a fair amount of money just by selling new
 > versions of XP;

Ah, but *can they*?  What service pack of XP runs on Android?  Nokia?
Samsung?  iPhone?  As somebody (Jim B, IIRC) just pointed out, the
netbooks are sufficiently cheap to sell and expensive to make that a
500 yen difference in Total Cost of Sales (Including Expected
Warrantee Liability) could make or break a whole new monopoly.  That's
the Innovator's Dilemma in a nutshell: the temptation is to try to go
with your existing technology, gradually improved, because it makes
you a lot more money than you can see coming from competing in the
market that is about to eat yours, skin, bones, and scales.

 > Yes, I think I agree with you here. Much as I suspect Linux developers
 > might argue otherwise, many of them appear to have taken on the
 > characteristics of people in the marketing department of any large
 > software company.

'BSDers (not to mention Debian and core GNU developers) have been
saying that since 1999.  Not that they're wrong<wink>, but nothin' new
here.

 > Well, there's also NetBSD (which actually has a better security record
 > than OpenBSD does,

Sure, credit where credit is due.  But Theo's the guy who put that
issue on the agenda, and OpenBSD has put a lot of effort into
engineering security even in long-proven, robust applications that you
would hope didn't need it.

 > Perhaps someone with the talent (but not the personality) of Theo or
 > Dan Bernstein will one day decide to produce a secure distro, but
 > it's a huge amount of work, and it's so hard to send patches upstream
 > (especially when you've got people like Ulrich Drepper involved) that
 > I can't see it happening unless someone finances it.

Oh, I think the NSA can move even Drepper if need be. :-)  But will
they want to....