Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu!verber
From: verber@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT and sources
Message-ID: <29954@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 22 Dec 88 16:45:50 GMT
References: <8812220917.AA10582@decwrl.dec.com>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: Ohio State University, Computer Science Department
Lines: 68

In article kevin@hiatus.dec.com (Kevin Baranski-Walker) writes:
>> I stressed to him the importance of sources, both for system administration
>> and for research ...
>
>Gee I got alot of work accomplished w/o MVS, RT-11, or VMS sources (pre-DEC
>of course :-)

There can be a lot of arguments about source/no-source.  Almost all
sites *think* that they do need source.  Most sites have at least one
hacker, and hackers by definition want source, if only to look at what
other people have done.  I agree that many sites don't need source,
but saying that sources to the OS aren't needed is just as extreme as
saying that everyone needs source.  There are certain types of sites
have a real need for source to the OS.

Two examples if sites that don't need source:

Application development.  A friend of mine has a few machines (Macs
currently, NeXT in the future?) and is doing some software
development.  He is writing a very slick tool to do dance notation.
He has no need for source.

Normal System Admin.  Another friend is a sys-admin for a network with
a few Suns.  The Sun provided servers (such a YP) handle all his
problems just fine.

There are other sites that this just doesn't work.  These sites would
be characterized by one of three things: size, security concerns, or
computer science research.  If a site has one of these attributes it
is somewhere between diffucult and impossible for them to function
effectively without source.

#1. Large and Complex Integration Problems

There are many sites out there that have a large collection of hosts
of varying types.  These sites often want the systems to have access
to identical services and resources.  Sometimes these sites have need
to drop things into the kernel.  One site might have home grown tools
that support distributed systems.  You could say they should use the
services of Mach, but they don't have Mach on most of their machines.
If you can't integrate these services researchers will have trouble
getting done what they want to do.  Other sites might have a locally
developped networking protocol, file system, etc which they need to
permit integration with the rest of their machines.

#2 High Security Sites.

Lets face it, all software vendors are slow when it comes to
distrubuting fixes.  This is a fact of life right now.  What happens
if a major hole is found in the NeXT OS at a secure site?  If they
don't have source they have two choices: disconnect the machines from
their network, or stop using the machines all together until the hole
is fixed.  Neither options is very good since it could be months until
they get fixes from the vendor.

#3 Research Sites

I work for a computer science department.  My users are researchers.
One research project is investigating system preformance.  Another
project is looking into different ways to do distributed systems.
Without sources these tasks can get very diffucult or impossible.  One
of the reasons that Mach has been successful (and useful) is because
there was a large body of code that didn't have to be written because
sources *were* available!  Thinks like Mach, Project Athena, etc. can't
happen without source.  This is a good way to kill the future of a product.

Mark A. Verber
Ohio State Univ.