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From: cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann)
Subject: Re: A3000UX competition
Message-ID: <1990Dec11.164431.819@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: Ziebmef home away from home
References: <86470@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <12003@hubcap.clemson.edu> <36449@cup.portal.com> <1990Dec2.153612.28555@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <36488@cup.portal.com>
Date: 11 Dec 90 21:44:31 GMT
Lines: 60

thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes:
| xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan)
| 	_The_ thing that made BSD so much better than its AT&T parent ...  was
| 	the ready availability of _almost free_, _full_ source code licences
| 	to the user/programmer community, so that the tremendous resource of
| 	free user community programming effort ... 
| 
| That's the VERY problem SVR4 prevents.  Now hear me out.  I, too, am
| from the "school" where ready availability of sources was de rigeur,
| and I've had mixed emotions on the SysV sources issue for quite some
| time.
| 
| One of the very reasons UNIX was NOT being as readily accepted in the "real"
| world was due to all the hundreds of customized "hacks" and non-portable
| features at each of 100's or 1000's of sites.  If one used feature "foo()"
| at site bar.edu, that feature was NOT guaranteed to be available or work
| the same at site nematode.com.

 Despite what vendor propaganda would have you believe, the reason so
many production sites want OS source code is not so that we can make
custom hacks but so that we can fix bugs. No smart system admin counts
on timely bugfixes from major vendors like SUN and DEC and SGI, not
even for important or critical bugs. A secondary issue is to be able
to adapt the system to important local requirements, such as a special
'nice' value for processes you want to run only when the system is
utterly idle, mass creation of (student) accounts from canned data, a
passwd command that refuses to let you use stupid passwords and lets
instructors change student passwords, a new working SMD disk driver,
or a rdump that understands using a remote account besides "root", or
similar things (all these examples are real ones from around the
University of Toronto). A tertiary issue is the ability to make
disparate systems look and feel the same (by such methods as modifying
SGI's stty to understand a number of BSDoid options -- things like
this are surprisingly important to local users).

 We demand source because we've been burned too much by its lack, not
because we have this desire to add custom hacks to our kernels or
utilities. Believe me, we'd all like to run stock systems, straight
off the vendor distribution tapes; it'd be significantly less work.
But our users have this liking for working systems and prompt fixes
for the bugs they find, neither of which the vendors we buy from have
been particularly good in supplying.

| One reason that I see for AT&T's recent high source license fees was to
| restrict random hacks to "responsible" port teams for platform-specific
| features as required, and to assure that SVR4 would have the same "look and
| feel" no matter what vendor's UNIX one chose to use.

 Uh huh. I suppose "broken" and "nonfunctional" everywhere is one
defenition of "consistent look and feel". It's just not a particularly
useful one.

[Needless to say, I do not speak officially for the University of
 Toronto as a whole or for UTCS.]
--
"If the vendors started doing everything right, we would be out of a
 job.  Let's hear it for OSI and X!  With those babies in the wings,
 we can count on being employed until we drop, or get smart and switch
 to gardening, paper folding, or something."	- C. Philip Wood
cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu	           ...!{utgpu,utzoo,watmath}!utgpu!cks