Wood, Arrows, and motivation

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Put a fork in it

Forking doesn't come from some altruistic view that change/competition is good, it comes from purposely trying to break your competitor and make something proprietary. OpenBSD was started because NetBSD threw out Theo de Raadt (hmm, don't call it an OPEN community). Has Linus ever done that? AIX was a latecomer to UNIX and IBM made sure that it was the best for long boot times (measured by "go get your coffee"). The Openview - X/Open Motif tiff made sure that GUIs on UNIX would remain proprietary.

As a UNIX sysadmin, I loved learning new things and mastering a new OS. I took great pride in creating scripts that worked on all flavors of UNIX. To me, the world was a great smorgasbord.

But trying to create a standard "user experience" - when we had workstations running SunOS, Ultrix, HP-UX, IRIX, and AIX, was a nightmare (Oh, and servers with similar "issues"). Even the same application might be set up differently under each OS (or it only worked on one or two OSes). Often, a great feature only existed on one or two OSes, so it wasn't used since the lowest common denominator prevailed. So forking frustrated the users and innovations were routinely ignored until every platform could take advantage of them. What good is NFSv4 when you have HP's stuck on ONC 1.1?

Eventually AIX could handle the NFS automounter (and NIS maps) correctly, so we/me/I was able to create a true fault-tolerant and load-balancing server/client setup. That was 1997 and it is still in use today at Ford. This work formed the basis of my self-configuring Autonomic architecture that I talk about in my blog http://autonomics.blogspot.com. Read about "Truth and Lies" configurations . . .

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 03/16/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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