[Annatar]

Linux destroyed so many good things, and some projects like SmartOS now have to spend major effort in educating the populace at large on why SmartOS is a better solution for the cloud and why data integrity and correctness of operation are important. And all of that just because GNU/Linux is argumentum ad populum. What a nightmare.

[cyphar]

> Linux destroyed so many good things

Would you prefer Windows? Because that's where the world was heading in the 90s. History happened, and what it shows is that Linux arose at a time when EVERYONE thought that Windows was going to steal Unix's throne. It's amazing you have such negativity about a piece of software.

[Annatar]

> Would you prefer Windows?

I would prefer sgi IRIX 6.5, but that's dead. In the absence of IRIX, illumos and SmartOS are the next best thing, so that is my next preference.

> Because that's where the world was heading in the 90s. > History happened, and what it shows is that Linux arose at a time when EVERYONE thought that Windows was going to steal Unix's throne.

Not everyone. I went through the entire '90's using Sun SPARC, sgi, hp PA-RISC and Commodore Amiga computers, and neither did Sun Microsystems. Didn't touch an intel-based PC until 2002, when I put together my first one, and even my current intel based PC runs Solaris 10.

Sun Microsystems was the only company which refused to bow, and continued developing Solaris. And while we know that eventually that company died, the OS lives on, and is being very actively developed, with new features added, and new technology invented.

> It's amazing you have such negativity about a piece of software.

You would also have it if your telephone rang with priority 1 incidents at two o' clock in the morning because Linux has a problem which I would not have had if I were using SmartOS. Then you'd have bonus negativity when you'd have to log into a crisis bridge and explain to a whole bunch of angry managers (who don't understand a thing about their decision to use Linux) that the application broke because Linux killed the service when it ran out of memory and oh by the way the data is also corrupted because the filesystem is a design from the '90's of the past century. And no I cannot find out why the application ran out of memory because the OS is locked up and when I reset it, I cannot get a core dump for analisys because I do not have adequate tools for that on Linux.

Computers and UNIX are my life calling, and since I am passionate about them, I spend extraordinary amounts of time working on them and researching them. Even what little free / spare time I have, I spend doing computer research and system engineering. So when according to my research and experience, something as inferior as GNU/Linux starts to push out a better solution just because of ignorance, it is only logical I have developed an intense hatred of it. It is messing with something I hold very dear, illumos and SmartOS - it's messing with UNIX.

And when I cannot find any SmartOS jobs where I live because every single ad says Linux-blah-blah Linux, you bet I hate it even more, since working on it, I get to experience first hand just how bad Linux is. When I'm forced to suffer because I am ordered to use Linux, and have problems I would not have if I had been on SmartOS, it's becomes personal, and it also becomes not just personal, but professional.

At home I have SmartOS and do not have a single issue I have at work, because I am using a different OS, a better one, and I love every microsecond developing on it and using it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to do some more software engineering. On GNU/Linux.

[cyphar]

> Not everyone.

BSD wouldn't have been free software without Stallman (he convinced them to release their changes under a free software license publicly). Same with OpenSolaris (the idea of free software wouldn't have existed). So, GNU was central to us not being in a world dominated by proprietary software.

But GNU was never going to be ready (Hurd will never be finished), so Linux offered us the opportunity to live in freedom. And people ended up using it. Yes, the kernel Linux has _many_ problems. But without it, we would be living in a much worse world than even the most broken of Linux interfaces and semantics. But GNU/Linux definitely was a saviour for Unix.

Yes, Sun was still holding on to Unix. But they were the only one (apart from Be, which folded soon after). But do you really thing they would've ever created OpenSolaris if GNU hadn't come into being and GNU/Linux hadn't started to dominate the market? I doubt it. History is odd like that.

[Annatar]

> Yes, the kernel Linux has _many_ problems. But without it, we would be living in a much worse world than even the most broken of Linux interfaces and semantics. But GNU/Linux definitely was a saviour for Unix.

Maybe you would be living in a much worse world, if your entire world up to that point in time consisted of Microsoft(R) Windows(R) and an intel based PC tin pail.

I was fine with using a binary only version of Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX; so long as I could get those gratis, along with compilers and software RAID, that was fine by me, as I had no interest in building my own OS at that point in time (unlike now). I also grew up on Commodore computers, where, when one bought a computer, it would come with detailed schematics, and the hardware was documented in detail[1][2].

I can only offer you empathy for the world you grew up in, but that does not give you the right, nor are you correct in assuming, that everyone else lacked the same freedoms you lacked: not everybody grew up in the United States which has fascist copyright laws. The country where I grew up did not have any copyright laws, and if it weren't for that, it would still be in the dark ages of Informatics and computer science, and I would not have ever become a computer professional. Other countries, for example Sweden and Spain, still have lax copyright laws, and thank goodness for that. The point is, don't make the error of assuming that the entire world was mis-fortunate and lacked freedom in this sense.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Reference-Manual-technical-r...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Amiga-Memory-Kernel-Reference-Manual/...

[cyphar]

> I was fine with using a binary only version of Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX; so long as I could get those gratis,

That's not the point at all. You didn't have any software freedom -- how did you modify your software? It's great that you could distribute it in your country, but you didn't have the means to practically modify software.

Also, gratis isn't the point. I don't care if I have to pay for GNU/Linux or any other software, I just care about whether or not I get software freedom as a result.

> not everybody grew up in the United States which has fascist copyright laws

I didn't grow up in the US.

> don't make the error of assuming that the entire world was mis-fortunate and lacked freedom in this sense.

You lacked the practical freedom to modify software (okay, so you didn't have copyright but if you don't have the source then you can't pracically modify your software without spending far too much time reverse-engineering it). I hate to break it to you, but you did lack freedom.

[Annatar]

> You didn't have any software freedom -- how did you modify your software?

In a program called a debugger, which back then was known as a monitor. You pressed a button, and the monitor was started from a cartridge, or you loaded a monitor, and then you loaded the machine code. And then you stepped through that disassembled code, and then you inserted a breakpoint in a strategic place. And when the program would stop execution, you'd consider the state of the program, and then you'd make the desired modifications, either by changing the existing processor instructions, or by adding your own code and hooking it in. Worked for an entire generation of crackers, I don't see what the big deal is.

So in that sense, there was no closed source, as nobody can really hide machine code, and believe you me, people have tried, and then some! But to a cracker, to a really good coder, every piece of code is open source, because there is nowhere to hide.

A much bigger deal was if you were not capable of this, because it meant you were a lamer and didn't make the cut.