Quoting Tim Churches <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Horst Herb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Minix and Linux to me illustrate the battle between academia and > > pragmatic engineering. Of course the pragmatic engineer will take a leaf > out of > > the academic book and benefit from teachings and research, but what they > do > > and how they do it is very, very different from academic "solutions". > > I suppose we are most interested here in solutions which see the light of day > and can thus be used by many people, not just their genius progenitor - > regardless of where such solutions come from. Gentlemen, please! ;-)
Both of you are quite right: Linux from the get-go was no way a Minix clone (32- vs 16-bit for starters). However Linus clearly used Minix as a requirements model in the early stages, and as a bootstrap system. More interestingly, he intended Linux as a 'stop-gap' measure while we wait for the 'offical' GNU kernel, the HURD, to emerge. HURD parallels Gnumed in many ways: ambitious projects, totally new design, very complex, poor governance, and no working result so far (actually gnumed has done better than the HURD) The lesson I draw is that volunteer free-software projects can achieve complex industry-ready outcomes, this has been done with Linux and many others, it's hard to see what's so special about medicine. But they all had a humble starting point and grew features organically, it's true no-one in the Free World has built a 100% system from scratch. I refer people to Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" for more around this idea. This ties in with how I would view interaction with academia. AFAICT what academics (and possibly other players) want is a fairly basic but open base system, on top of which they can install the 'research' features such as decision-support, natural language coding, etc. that they want. So, IMHO a "small target" is in order, not the best, just usable, focussing on the bread-and-butter stuff that Jon et al. isn't interesting in. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
