Linux is obsolete (1992) | Hacker News Reader

Linux is obsolete (1992)

ibm.com

10 pointsramgorur5 comments

The title is misleading, should add the date of the important content: 1992.

> "Portability is for people who cannot write new programs"

I like the fact that Linux has now been ported on a bunch of other architectures and it does not contradict the meaning of the quote. Focusing on portability gets you exactly what you want: a portable program; if you want a great and usable software, focus on that. The (relatively) easy portability is a by-product of a good design chosen for maintainability.

The battlefield was not 'technology', micro-kernels are technically in many ways that you can actually measure superior to macro-kernels, just not in the one that everybody is always focussing on (raw throughput, which hardly every is the actual bottle-neck).

The battlefield was 'community', and because of Linux's more open nature it won that particular battle hands-down.

The problem seems to be that people interpret Linux's widespread adoption as a triumph of technology.

The same goes for Microsoft's and Apple's OSes. The intrinsic quality of a technology is poorly correlated with its commercial success. There are a few cases where a great technology did make a huge difference, but most people do not care if what they are using is efficient, maintainable, or more often that you would think, easy to use (what does matter is the steepness of the learning curve around t=0).

The few cases where great technology made it to a broad use is when it opened new ways of doing things. I may be wrong but I think that personal computer advertising was quite poor but still gradually got users because of what you could do with it. Yet, is was really cumbersome to use at the time.

VERY MISLEADING TITLE.

I'm all for people reading up on the famous discussion, but with this link-bait title it seems that IBM is announcing that Linux is obsolete, which is far from the case here. Someone who can blog at IBM is just linking to a 22-year-old discussion without actually offering an opinion or anything new.

The thing is, linux IS obsolete. The winner may not be microkernels. Maybe exokernels or library OS's or whatever. But it's taking a long time to realise (the essence of the technology will likely win eventually, despite the competing incarnations), and so it looks like linux is winning.

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