Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Why so many distros? The Weird History of Linux" video.

  1. 8:12 He was actually forced to create Git. What happened was that BitKeeper was made available as freeware to the Linux developer community, hedged around with a great deal of caveats. One of these was “no reverse engineering”. Torvalds felt for some reason he could agree to these terms on behalf of the entire Open Source community. So when Andrew Tridgell was commissioned (by the FSF, I think) to reverse-engineer BitKeeper’s formats and protocols, Torvalds ordered him to stop. To which he responded in the predictable way. So Larry McVoy gave notice of the termination of the BitKeeper licence. Torvalds went off to ruminate on things for a couple of weeks, and came back with the beginnings of Git. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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  2. Don’t use an RE to parse e-mail addresses.
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  3. 5:38 That “security” aspect was a bit of a joke in the early days, when Red Hat installers tended to load on everything by default. A client of mine got hacked through a vulnerability in the SunRPC service, which we weren’t even using.
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  4.    I recall that. Tridge just Telnetted into the BitKeeper server, typed “help”, and it told him a lot of what he needed to know. Also, reverse-engineering is explicitly permitted under 🇪🇺 law.
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  5.  @adriantrummer6126  You invited me to change your mind, now you are saying it is closed anyway.
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  6. Do any of his reasons make sense?
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  7. Would you entrust mission-critical business functions to an OS that can only handle 26 drive letters?
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  8.  @adriantrummer6126  Or how about basic office functions like reliable printing, or trusting that the system will not suddenly delete all your files? In other words, the sort of areas where Windows has been spectacularly lacking of late?
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  9.  @adriantrummer6126  It happened to others.
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  10.  @adriantrummer6126  So you were not really here to argue any kind of objective truth, but merely to bore us with your own personal opinions.
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  11.  @adriantrummer6126  But you can’t find anybody else who does.
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  12.  @adriantrummer6126  Aren’t Windows users supposed to be in the majority? Yet you know I’m right.
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  13. @Adrian Trummer You were the one trying to claim “the majority isn’t always right” ... are you now walking back on that? Yes, they do deliver a better user experience, actually. If only because they are more customizable than the one-size-fits-all Windows interface. You see this in the number of people complaining about limitations of the Windows UI that don’t happen in Linux. And in how Microsoft keeps copying features from Linux.
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  14. It’s officially “Unix”, but it is far from working the way normal people expect a “Unix” system to work.
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