>
> > I still remember my disappointment in 1995 when I got an Aix station
> > and noticed that in many areas its software was inferior to Linux's.
>
> It's true that many of the other Unixes were and still are inferior to
> Linux, but having used them in production situations they were often
> more than sufficient. I'd even go as far as to say a lot of the stuff
> that was "fixed" didn't need to be fixed (not that it hurts I guess).
>
> I'm not pointing this at anyone in particular but, there's a sort of
> arrogance in the open source community that I sometimes find a little
> frustrating. It's this sort of feeling that everyone else can't produce
> code or an OS worth anything. When this is kept humerous it's fine (hey,
> I pick on Macs and Windows too) but then it often rises to an almost
> xenophobic level. The people who wrote AT+T, BSD, AIX, SunOS, Solaris,
> Ultrix, MacOS, (um, I'm torn about Windows), etc. etc. weren't and
> aren't dolts and I think it's a little presumptive to think that
> anything that was written by them can be done better by open source.
> Yes, Linux has some very nice features and improvements, but believe me
> there are plenty of shortcomings and things the "competitors" do better.
>
<end of reply snipped>
I was not implying IBM's engineers were and are not good: they are.
The Haifa optimizer for Gcc is their work. Aix has features I would
want for Linux. They have a very fast RDBMS. Last buy not meast they
have MVS. :-)
But for IBM utilities like grep, awk, the shell or the window manager
aren't hot so IBM spends liitle or no resources into making a faster
grep or even fix its bugs (read the "software fuzz revisited" paper:
40% of the bugs reveled in proprietary Unixes basic utilities were
still present 5 years later).
In 1995 with AIX I had a 20" screen, eight times more memory than in
my 386, and far more horsepower but I ran into the limitations of its
basic utilities, I had only VI (I happen to hate it), no virtual
screens like in FVWM. So even in 1995 Linux was exciting to use and a
fair part of its appeal came from FSF software, another one coming
from software not directly produced by FSF but under its ideological
influence.
Notice that I don't endorse Stallamn's claims about GNU/Linux
--
Jean Francois Martinez
Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org
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