[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Dan Cross]

In article <un21bb$7ea$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>In article <un1s48$2r0sq$1 at dont-email.me>,
>Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>>On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 19:41:21 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>>> Furthermore, the rate of change in Linux is high; following along from
>>> outside is fraught.
>>
>>Strange, isn’t it: Microsoft must have access to at least a couple of 
>>orders of magnitude greater development resources than that available to 
>>the Linux kernel project, yet they cannot keep up with what the Linux 
>>developers have achieved.
>
>This presumes that the high rate of change of Linux is actually good.  I
>rather suspect it is not.

I think there's a lot of churn.  What's missing is a lot of
principled engineering; Linux has evolved, and it's impressive
what it has evolved into (honestly the world's most important
operating system) but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is
_good_ in all respects (it is objectively not).

Take, for instance, the lack of internal kernel interfaces and
gregkh's insistence that, not only are they unnecessary, they
are _bad_: this can make things very hard to work with, with
multiple generations of partial interfaces all coresident at the
same time, and little incentive to clean up the resulting
complexity or mess.  Honestly, I'm often surprised that it works
as well as it does.  Compare to Solaris, on the other hand, that
has documented stable interfaces all over.  Sure, there are some
cases where they're not used (or used well...) but this means
that binary modules compiled out-of-tree can work across
multiple versions of the operating system, which is pretty cool.
And neigh impossible for non-trivial things in the Linux world.

	- Dan C.