[geeks] The best things in the world

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 03:37:59PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> 
> >>Thanks, but I'll stick with OS X, BSD, and Solaris.
> >
> >I find it hard to believe that we would have affordable choice if it
> >weren't for linux.
> 
> Why?  4.3BSD predates Linux.  Yggdrasil Linux just barely came out before
> NetBSD 0.8.  FreeBSD 1.0 and Slackware 1.0 were released within months of
> each other.  NetBSD and FreeBSD had several releases before Red Hat Linux
> 1.0 was released.

I saw no sign of them taking off.  I never heard of any BSD for the PC
(although I certainly had heard of BSD in general) until long after I
was using linux.  That suggests to me that BSD was for some reason
incapable of really cementing unix on the PC as a viable alternative to
Windows. 
 
> >I tend to think that it is because of linux that I realisticly have the
> >choice of not using Windows (or linux) at home (OSX, BSD, and Solaris.
> 
> OS X isn't an outgrowth of Linux, it's an outgrowth of NeXTstep and Mach.

Solaris also isn't an outgrowth of linux.  I clearly realize that.
Would Apple still be around if linux wasn't?  Would OS X still embrace
it's unix-ish heritage if it weren't for linux?  Perhaps.  But I really
don't think that Sun would still be around if linux hadn't existed, even
though Solaris is clearly not descended from Linux.  
 
> >Plus, FWIW, OSX, BSD, and Solaris would all be unsuitable for my current
> >project at work.
> 
> I suspect Windows SBS would be, too.  Real-time systems are a completely
> separate discussion.  If Linux is a halfway decent RTOS, the world would
> be better served by it sticking to that, rather than being a poor
> workstation OS.

Absolutely, although for some reason people keep trying.  Well, not SBS,
but Windows in general.

Now, what gets to me is that it seems that a lot of non-RTOS embedded
use would be much better done with *BSD, so it really irritates me that
we aren't seeing things like Linksys devices running BSD.  I would love
to be able to reflash linsys wrt54gl's with NetBSD or OpenBSD instead of
linux. 

I think Linux has two good niches in embedded systems.  First, it has
good realtime capabilities.  Not as good as QNX or VxWorks perhaps, but
still very good for many purposes.  Second, there is uCLinux, which will
run on smaller hardware than any BSD that I am aware of, while still
allowing you to reuse a lot of software that wouldn't work on something
like eCos.

I certainly wish to see a lot more OpenSolaris server usage in general
though.