Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Making of Linux: The World's First Open-Source Operating System" video.

  1. 1:10 Multics had some features that would still be considered advanced today. For example, something still lacking in present-day Linux is the ability to share ownership controls over a set of files/directories between more than one user. Linux has ACLs, but there is no ACL entry conveying ownership privileges, like there was on Multics.
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  2. I doubt the toenails part. Remember, he was living in a country that offered free Socialist-style healthcare to all its citizens.
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  3. 1:17 There were other groundbreaking OSes from around this time--you have already mentioned Multics, let me add also TENEX and ITS. Why is it most people only remember Unix nowadays, and none of the others? It is because Unix was the only one to make the leap to becoming a portable OS. The others were developed on particular hardware architectures; when those died, they died with them. While the original PDP-11 architecture that Unix started on is a museum piece nowadays, the OS architecture itself was sufficiently adaptable to make the jump to 32-bit, and then 64-bit, hardware. And Linux has carried that portability tradition to the next level, being ported to an average of one new major architecture for just about every year of its existence.
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  4. I remember when the Raspberry π first came out, there was no good OS for it. You could run a version of Debian for ARM, but that was not optimized for the particular combination of an older version of the ARM instruction set, combined with hardware floating-point, that was implemented on the Broadcom processor used in the π. So a couple of guys set out to rebuild the whole of Debian just for that hardware. As I recall, it took them about six weeks. And remember, all this building had to be done on the Raspberry π itself--the original single-processor model. The result was called “Raspbian”, but these days I believe the Raspberry π Foundation have taken it over and officially dubbed it the “Raspberry π OS”. So that’s an example of the kind of work it takes to create your own distro.
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  5.  @liquidmobius  That’s FreeBSD-based. Why not mention MINIX? That is a “true” microkernel design.
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  6.  @liquidmobius  Worth mentioning, then Intel’s use of MINIX as the OS on its “Integrated Management Engine” included in many of its processors. Remember you claimed it was “far superior” in terms of “security”? Well, it turned out the IME had some rather glaring security holes. And given that the subsystem has total control over the CPU, and can totally bypass any privilege protections of the OS running on there, the consequences have been rather ... unfortunate.
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  7. BSD development has a whole different culture around it -- more centralized, less adaptable. I doubt it could have filled the gap.
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  8.  @elliotts5574  It’s MINIX. MINIX is a microkernel -- there is no “confusion” about that.
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  9. IBM’s OSes were never “open source”. Source code may have been available to customers, but under restrictions.
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  10.  @danielrhouck  Initially IBM made its software available to customers free of charge. But this was seen as unfair to independent developers who wanted to create a software industry. So as a result of the 1956 “Consent Decree”, I think it was, IBM were forced to “unbundle” -- charge extra for the OS etc.
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  11. He is a prophet. He may not be nice to know personally, but he has been right about the dangers of proprietary computer systems more than once.
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  12.  @bazoo513  Companies like Microsoft were always going to badmouth anything that they saw as a threat to their business model, even if someone like Stallman did not exist. There were those who even claimed that Free software was “communist”!
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  13. The common factor in all of these variants is ... Linux. Hence the name.
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  14. Microkernels are pretty much a relic of history at this stage. ∗cough∗ GNU Hurd ∗cough∗
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  15.  @liquidmobius  Nobody has got one working properly to production quality. Nobody. FreeBSD I think has the vestiges of a microkernel at its heart, but that had to be bastardized somewhat in the name of performance.
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  16.  @liquidmobius  I wonder why you say that such characteristics of the software have nothing to do with the software itself. That’s a very dubious assertion to make. The objective facts are that the IME runs MINIX, and it has vulnerabilities.
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  17.  @liquidmobius  Sounds like you are trying to argue in circles: first claiming that microkernels are more “secure”, then, when faced with evidence to the contrary, trying to claim that those vulnerabilities don’t count. If serious vulnerabilities don’t count, then which ones do?
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  18.  @trollerjakthetrollinggod-e7761  If a microkernel cannot safely run in a “privileged state”, then how is it supposed to be used?
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  19. Worth mentioning that “operating system” seems to be essentially synonymous with “kernel” -- at least according to Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of the MINIX Book. So the GNU project was (and still remains) a userland in search of an OS.
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  20. Oh heck no. I suspect Nokia is better known--and much missed by many former users, victims of Microsoft’s hamfisted destruction of the company. But yeah, Linux is certainly longer-lived.
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  21. EWD could be a bit of a troll sometimes, as in his comments on programming languages. For example, on BASIC, he said “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
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  22.  @D0J0P  Sure it was, but remember open-source OSes were not heavily used back then. So it’s not that people “abandoned” BSD, it simply didn’t grow as fast as Linux. I don’t think AT&T were ever fans of BSD. That’s why you had the AT&T-versus-BSD divide among flavours of proprietary Unix.
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  23.  @leogama3422  Not a chance. Open-source is about enhancing competition, not killing it.
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  24. GNU is userland, not the kernel/OS.
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  25.  @noam65  With systemd, you use journalctl to look at log files.
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  26. 9:59 Also worth mentioning, a survey of the VFX industry released about a year ago showed that 60% of their machines were running Linux. Think of that the next time you watch some movie or TV show with CGI† in it. †Assuming you can tell, and a lot of it is so good now that you can’t.
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  27. 10:17 NASA’s Mars helicopter also runs Linux!
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