[Annatar]

I have never in my life dealt with engineers so competent, professional and kind as the Sun Microsystems folks were. If they were technologically arrogant, they earned it: their inventions outlasted the company and live on in many products.

I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at hp, SGI and Sun Microsystems did. They might have shoddily implemented it by writing the code from scratch, but they blatantly stole everything. For instance, the manual page for chkconfig(8) will even tell one that the command comes from SGI's IRIX.

[cyphar]

While I definitely agree that Sun, HP, and SGI had amazing engineering this section of your comment is particularly ridiculous:

> I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at [...] did.

If we ignore the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git, and so on), and just look at your statement at face value -- you're saying that nobody from the largest free software community in the world has invented anything new in the past 10-15 years. What possible evidence do you have that this is true? It's not just wrong, it's offensively so.

Heck, ZFS-on-Linux is now the repo-of-record for ZFS -- that's a specific example of the GNU/Linux community implementing things alongside the rest of the free software community (and currently ZoL has more features than any other ZFS port).

It's also the case that those brilliant engineers did the same thing. Zones are arguably a re-implementation of Jails with some slightly different design goals. IOCP is objectively just a copy of kqueue (to the point where Cantrill said he wished they'd just ported kqueue). And so on. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but it's quite strange to put them up on a pedestal to the point where you effectively say that any engineer who didn't work at Sun/HP/SGI in 2003 hasn't invented anything.

There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, DTrace vs eBPF+bpftrace, and so on). But arguing that nothing innovative has come out of the GNU/Linux community ever is just awful.

[kragen]

> the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git...

...and Wikipedia, BitTorrent, the WWW (open-source, though developed on NeXTStep), the Objective-C compiler that made it possible, Emacs (and its idea of an extensible self-documenting editor), Perl, bash, the dpkg/apt system the app stores ape poorly, the CTAN and CPAN systems it derived from, most aspects of decentralized source control in the form of arch (and then later Mercurial and Git), rsync, Docker, Nix, GNU make, Python 3, gold (the linker), iptables, Enlightenment, the Hurd, MySQL, PNG, Pango, Numpy, IPython/Jupyter, Ruby, the X11 Render extension, LADSPA, Valgrind, asan/ubsan, basically everything on CPAN, all the inventions in x264, ...

I'm not sure Apache belongs in there, though. Rob McCool might take exception to being called a "GNU/Linux hacker", though I don't think Robert Thau would mind.

> There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, ...

Oh c'mon, is the problem that Linux doesn't innovate enough or that Linux innovates too much? Epoll is an example of Linux arguably innovating too much.

[SwellJoe]

Not a single one, huh? I'll help: https://git-scm.com/

[cyphar]

There is a counter-argument to git -- namely Sun had TeamWare[1] (the prequel to BitKeeper) and thus you could argue that git is still a "shoddy reimplementation". But this of course ignores the fact that TeamWare was almost completely unknown outside Sun until BitKeeper came along (at which point it was just an element of BitKeeper's history), and that git is objectively superior in many metrics to TeamWare.

Personally I think GCC, Apache, and nginx are much better counter-arguments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_WorkShop_TeamWare

[Annatar]

Quite unfortunately for all of us condemned to use GNU/Linux:

- GCC exists because Sun Studio compilers weren't free back then;

- Apache is the next generation NCSA web server;

- nginex is a re-invented Apache wheel.

Do you have any more examples to get corrected on? I'll be glad to set you straight, in the hope that unlike your Linux buddies you are capable of learning.

They are simply amateurs wanting to play engineers, but they never were engineers and never will be, and it shows in just how shitty GNU/Linux based operating systems are. Hacked up together by hackers according to the "hack it 'till it works, man!" motto. And they don't learn from their mistakes or from the mistakes of others, on top of being deeply convicted that they are the best.

Find me one technology invented in GNU/Linux which UNIX did not already invent and I will publicly retract my statement here. Just one.

[cyphar]

Okay, here are two examples: rsync and restic[1] (an evolution of borgbackup[2]). You already know what rsync is, but the other two are backup tools that offer encryption and content-based deduplication. There is no distinction between a "full" backup and an "incremental" backup.

Now, I already know that you're going to say that "zfs send" already does these things -- but it really doesn't. First of all, ZoL only recently got encryption support so built-in encryption with ZFS only came around recently (and was developed by someone from the GNU/Linux community, by the way). Also, ZFS's dedup is so expensive that it's very strongly recommended that people don't use it unless they really need it. Deduplication with restic and borgbackup is content-based which means that it's far more resilient to shifting bytes in files and it's effectively free because everything is stored as a CAS (to be fair, it's only mostly free because people don't use it as a filesystem).

Again, I really am not bagging on Sun here. I just think it's quite ludicrous that you're saying that any engineer who didn't work at Sun pre-2010 never invented anything. I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that, purely based on how ludicrous of a concept it is.

[1]: https://restic.net/ [2]: https://www.borgbackup.org/

[Annatar]

Sorry buddy, but https://illumos.org/man/1/filesync predates rsync.

Borgbackup is a third party, unbundled application. I don't see what it has to do with people hacking on GNU/Linux like mad.

"I just think it's quite ludicrous that you're saying that any engineer who didn't work at Sun pre-2010 never invented anything."

You didn't get it quite right: I'm saying that professional engineers worked at Sun Microsystems, hp and SGI. That's statement #1. Statement #2 is that people working on GNU/Linux are amateurs who didn't invent anything. Statement #3 is that because they are amateurs who are incapable of learning, they just keep hacking shit together haphazardly and will never be engineers like the people from Sun, hp and SGI. Especially SGI: SGI had the best engineers. Those people were way ahead of their time in every technical aspect imaginable.

"I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that, purely based on how ludicrous of a concept it is."

Believe it. GNU/Linux people are amateurs. They don't have it in them. They want to be thought of as engineers but they aren't. They just aren't capable of it. That's why GNU and GNU/Linux are garbage and will never be anything more than a pile of haphazard, shoddily slapped together hacks. That's the world we live in now, where IT is shit thanks to their shitty, shoddy work.

[cyphar]

Dave Chinner is an ex-SGI engineer who has been working on XFS since the beginning of the project and is currently a Linux kernel maintainer. Brendan Gregg is ex-Sun and worked on DTrace and currently is helping improve Linux's tracing capabilities. Are they "amateurs who are incapable of learning" or "professional engineers"?

I've seen comments from you about how GNU/Linux is awful in every respect ever since you created your account ~3 years ago. I really can't imagine being so stuck in a mindset that you feel the need to spend so much of your time being angry about such a large community of people. Honestly, I just don't get it and I earnestly hope that this is just an online persona you have.