Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:74323 alt.religion.computers:2210 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,alt.religion.computers Subject: Re: A3000UX competition Message-ID: <1990Dec13.061733.735@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 13 Dec 90 06:17:33 GMT References: <1990Dec2.153612.28555@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <36488@cup.portal.com> <1990Dec11.164431.819@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 45 cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann) writes: >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 [...] > (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. A fourth "good" from having system source available is the _tremendous_ increase in programmer productivity it gives. When chasing down a bug, it is much faster to chase _my_ bug through the vendor's code to see just why it is a bug, than to chase _their_ bug all over my code, looking for something that just isn't there. In a day of source level debuggers, having _all_ the source is crucial. Having it priced out of reach is a devastating blow to code implementation. Kent, the man from xanth.