karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer) (09/09/87)
In article <2283@xanth.UUCP>, kyle@xanth.UUCP (Kyle Jones) writes: > ... > Forthermore, it's unreasonable to expect the FSF to complete the entire > GNU Project alone. The GNU system is being developed so ALL of us can > use it, so we all should pitch in. Think how much sooner the GNU > system would be completed if each one of us were to take one small > part of the project and work on it in our spare time. I think they would have done better by implementing the kernel and a set of basic utilities first, and distribute it in an incomplete but runnable state, as Tanenbaum has done with Minix. That way, anyone can get the common development environment and start hacking and writing tools and utilities for it. As Mike Meyer (eris!mwm) pointed out (ref. 4895@jade.BERKELEY.EDU), FSF is working on software for the next generation of machines. Realize that this works against getting a lot of people to pitch in, as the vast majority of us do not have Sun 3 class machines. It seems to me that the FSF folks make more work for themselves by the choices they have made on what to develop and release and in what order. Please understand that I am not denigrating the massive and high quality work done by Mr. Stallman and the other FSF contributors. Minix, as an alternative, is not really very far along in terms of being a serious replacement for Unix. However, a lot of people are working on it. (Have a look at all the activity in comp.os.minix sometime) I think this is because Minix runs on inexpensive, widely available hardware, is itself widely available and cheap and it exists in a form such that it can be used, now, as a native environment to develop and run software. For aspiring kernel hackers, it comes with all source and is complete enough to recompile itself. Once this "testbed" was created and distributed, a lot of people started working really hard to port their C code over to it. Also, Minix has been ported to at least three different CPU architectures. Understand also that people running Minix are pioneers, as people running GNU will be. By this I mean that users of these systems are largely on there own; there is unlikely to ever be a tech support hot line for either system. (OK, OK, it's possible. Please don't follow up just to speculate on how it could be done.) You're always on your own when you run public domain software, and as good as it may be and as crummy as the phone support often is from the vendors, it can be really, really nice to make that phone call and get help rather than having to bulldoze your own way through. I speculate that there are a lot more Minix systems out there than GNU ones, and that there is more total work being done on Minix that GNU. That won't change until hardware capable of running GNU is much more ubiquitous and the GNU software it out, widely distributed, and mostly working. -- ...!soma!uhnix1!sugar!karl "Life, don't talk to me about life." - Marvin TPA