from a larger interview on Slashdot. I like his insights on vegetation and the Evilness of Red Hat :)
Reminds me of Ulrich Drepper.. another prickly personality. :P But then *he* works for Red Hat.. --- I am not a genius, I am just never satisfied and very very persistent. I approach science like a blind man with a stick who is determined to fully understand what is going on. The difference between me and my competition is that I poke more than they do. I observe, find something to be unsatisfied with, try something to fix it, most of the time it fails and I try again. You don't see the failures because they don't get released. Why haven't other people already fixed the traditional balanced tree algorithms and made them effective enough for storing files? Because it was too much work, and they were smart enough to avoid the work, that is all. We simply rewrite more times and more deeply than others do, and that is how we get our results in our admittedly obscure field. Now if you think about it, who wants to be around a blind man with a stick, someone who keeps insisting things aren't good enough and they need rewriting? There is yet another way of looking at it though. Linux is an ecosystem, and in this ecosystem there is fast growth vegetation and slow growth vegetation. The fast growth vegetation are the people who took what had already been done by Unix, and without changing its design they copied it while making coding improvements. Then there are those who look at Unix, err, Linux, and see something just barely begun that needs a complete overhaul. These are the slow growth vegetation. Namesys is slow growth vegetation that got started a long time ago. Now it is human nature that however a human being is, he is inclined to think that is the right way to be. There are those who think that design does not matter, and one should just make incremental coding improvements. There are also those who think that just coding without introducing fundamental new ideas is unimportant. Both of these sets of persons are fools. To say that one approach is better than another is like saying that grass is better than trees, or trees are better than grass. For Linux to prosper as an ecosystem it must have both. Unfortunately the fast growth vegetation is actually developing a culture of exclusion, kind of like grass working to strangle the tree seedlings. Linux is developing more and more of an insider circle. Those who cannot code well enough to survive on the merits, must politick to exclude the threats.... A sad thing about this is that the most talented young security researcher I know doesn't want to develop for Linux because of the attitude of the inner circle to new people, and I can't really blame him, it is why I didn't develop ReiserFS for BSD back when BSD was.... Almost certainly he is not alone.... It is all very fine to discuss the sociology of herd formation, exclusion, and prejudice in the abstract, but one should never say that particular persons are making particular decisions on the basis of their herd instincts unless one wants to be truly hated by them and all of their numerous friends, and this was my mistake over and above the choice of what sub-herd to be part of. I don't think anyone "eggs me on" though. I press released benchmarks of ReiserFS vs. ext3 the day ext3 was formally released at a conference, before ReiserFS had been included, and is it a surprise one of them was pissed at me? My competitors didn't and don't want ReiserFS in the kernel, and I wanted and want it in, and the result has all the dignity of a food fight. Filesystems that are less threatening nobody cares enough about to seek to exclude them. Many thanks to Linus, who chooses to allow healthy competition among the filesystems in his kernel. If only the largest distro was so permissive.... You do all understand that while the GPL doesn't permit tying by license, distros have now moved to using threats of invalidating support contracts to achieve the market leverage they need to exclude competitors, yes? By doing this they can exclude mainstream official kernels from being used, exclude rival filesystems, exclude whatever might lead to less customer lockin..... This is why you should try to avoid buying support contracts from distros and only buy support from those who agree to support you the customer doing whatever you choose to do, even if it is something fringe like using a kernel from Linus.;-) They will tell you all this nonsense about how they can't support whatever software you choose to use. Buy better support from an independent and you won't hear this nonsense (www.Namesys.com/support.html is $25 a question and there are plenty of others). Most independents will support you using whatever distro you want, using whatever configuration you want, and they have the skill to cope with that. Sure, they will tell you that such and such gcc release on such and such distro was a lemon, or maybe even that the only reasonable fix for your bug is to upgrade to a recent release, but your support provider should never be telling you that you can only use what they sold you. I am trying to convince the GSA that they should avoid procuring free software support that constrains the government's choice of what software to use, and they are at least considering the point of view. Why bother to have the GPL if you accept this loss of freedom? Ummh, maybe these sorts of statements are why I am not so popular....;-) Well, glad to have answered your question! We should all keep in mind though that there aren't any hard core greedy evil people in our industry. They are all basically good hearted people who chose trying to create a better society as their life's work at a substantial cost in personal income. Petty, bickering, overly impressed with ourselves, flaming, yes that describes most of us Linux kernel developers, but there isn't enough money floating around to attract any genuinely bad folks into our industry. Not yet....;-) -- Hans -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
