Seriously?

I might have been living under a rock and everybody but me already heard about this story. But I would expect that every HN reader would drop his coffee cup reading this for the first time.

Is this true? Why had I never heard about it? Why should Bill do that?

https://lwn.net/2001/features/KernelSummit/

From that article: " The first presentation was by Lance Larsh of Oracle who, essentially, provided a laundry list of changes and features Oracle would like to see in order to get better performance out of high-end, large database servers "

...bullet list...

" The reception was "generally" positive - many or most of the above problems are well known and on the list to be fixed in 2.5 already. One exception was the non-preemption request, which was considered dangerous and unnecessary. "

J. Corbet is the author.

Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

"Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks with memory, etc"

It's the first time however I hear anyone claiming as much credit. Oracle didn't even start dabbling with Linux until 21st century, and it was already a decade old project dominating Internet server deployments at that point.

Linux would have succeeded with or without Oracle, and I find it sad that you would try to re-write history to the point where it would seem that without Oracle linux would have remained a toy.

Ehhh... I don't see where he claimed anything about that. I see "Linux was a toy. Oracle helped make it not a toy." But, nothing about what would have happened otherwise. Be careful not to get sad over things not said. Principle of Charity and all that...

Toy: for amusement or education of creator.

Non-toy: implements real requirement for some task.

For instance, 80 bytes of machine code which pop out a piece of bread when it toasts to a certain darkness level: non-toy.

1990 POSIX didn't have aio_read and all that; it came later. A lot of this stuff was being standardized in parallel with the progress being made in Linux. According to the 1997 Single Unix Spec (Issue 2), the aio stuff came from the 1993 real-time extensions to POSIX. [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/aio_read....] "Derived from the POSIX Realtime Extension (1003.1b-1993/1003.1i-1995)". This was bleeding edge POSIX in the mid 1990's, and didn't exist when Torvalds started.

The performance optimization requirements of large databases aren't the be-all and end-all of "non-toyness", anyway.

The Linux people were decent at optimizing for the cases that their user base cared about. E.g. Linux exploded as a web server OS all over the world, so there was a lot of focus on decent networking, and tricks like serving a static file right out of the kernel and whatnot.

Which news groups were those? They (and your posts) should still be around somewhere.

I don't think anyone ignores anything, it's more like the OSS community (of which I'm not a part, btw) simply doesn't feel that their freedom is a good price to pay for - anything, really.

Also, to be fair, the "rich and powerful" mostly get into peoples' way when we try to live our lives in a meaningful way, and that includes OSS folk, who just like to write and exchange software. If the "rich and powerful" decide to patent everything, which is the real sticking point for the OSS community, then the OSS folk have no toys to play with.

Understandably, they are not happy with that.

Would you mind sharing a link by any chance?

That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

I can't anyone is even disputing the fact that OS X didn't largely benefit from the fact that there was tons of GNU/GPL tooling out of the box that power users could use. Bash? GCC/G++ (before the clang/llvm migration out)? GNU. X-windows (granted I don't think many people used it post-Carbon, but I remember using it on my iBook 266mhz...).

\/ Edit: Mea culpa. IIRC you're right re: tcsh. I haven't used OS X as a daily operating system since first year undergrad (placing that at just under a decade) so afford me some liberties with details, kindly :)

NCSA httpd released version 0.1 was June 1991. http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html

Amusingly: http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do... "3.5) Why doesn't NCSA HTTPd work on my Linux system? NCSA HTTPd is not crippled. Linux may be crippled. NCSA HTTPd uses a standard BSD4 and SYSV feature known as file descriptor passing. NCSA HTTPd supports both the BSD and SYSV style of file descriptor passing. Linux chose not to implement either."

In fact, SLAC was first to the web in the USA, and Marc had originally approached my boss, who wrote MidasWWW, to see if he'd want to collaborate on the web browser which would become Mosaic.

PS: An interesting side note, the SGML standard committee decided not to include hyperlinks which more or less directly resulted in HMTL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La... I wonder if that would have pushed the web forward even faster or not as HTML is far less strict, but you could make a less strict render for SGML as well.

I don't think so. But IRC predates Linux. :)

All of these components played their part in the rise of the OS and benefited from each other. The Linux kernel as well as things like the GNU project were absolutely necessary for this ecosystem to becoming a reality and that is what OS X benefited from as well.

Not quite, actually.

Samba => sometime in 1992

Linux => October 1991

It wasn't invented for Linux, but Samba exists today because of it.

Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

Otherwise I only saw Solaris or commercial types of unix (like what came with IBM servers) in use in companies I directly worked with. I understand that linux was already rising pretty strong, but tried and true Unix/BSD systems were definitely seen as the more 'serious'/professional choices.

Which was interesting because then Linux became faster, and had things like better SMP support that didn't get improved in BSD to give it the performance edge until 2007 or so...

(Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned sexy laptop.. and I used it for developing apps for Linux and SGI Irix without much hassle.)

You had to take care to use libraries/APIs that were available at all three systems (no dlopen() or dlsym() at the time in OSX!), and take quirks of the OSX linker into account.

(Disclaimer: I was getting angry at Apple at the time. In a few years, they went through OS9->OSX migration, getting rid of Classic mode in emulation and now switching to Intel. They were breaking compatibility again; it meant buying new software like MS Office again - looking at the PC side, they didn't have such problem. So PB12 was my last Mac for a long time... until 2015, actually).

To me it's when the Intel macs came along (10.4.4 I think) that new adopters really started picking up steam, but the ecosystem they helped build wasn't really there yet.

At least, that's my perception.

Everyone was buzzing about Linux. The general attitude was 'Why would you run Solaris when you could just run Linux'

Maybe in other segments Solaris was a 'big deal' but for students and developers Linux was a game changer.

Hardly. How would have Apple developed a full userland and development toolchain with the resources it had at that time? That's exactly the point of the article: OS X wouldn't be where it is without Linux (read: GNU/Linux), not because it was technically the best Unix (it wasn't), but because it was free software.

Linux succeeded due to its compatibility with this rich ecosystem of software, not the other way around.

What Linux changed that it opened the GNU software to much wider audience. You didn't need an expensive Sun workstation, cheap (relatively, at the time) PC was enough.

With the Linux kernel and GNU software, you had a complete, usable system, that anybody could use. Many people did, and they contributed back. The development accelerated.

So technically, no, OSX doesn't rely on Linux-the-kernel. But it benefited by the increased exposure GNU software got.

(Samba is about a year younger than Linux-the-kernel.)

Linux did not exist at the time.

That's kind of cheating though. OS X is a "workstation OS" but it's also a "desktop OS" used by millions of elementary school teachers and news reporters. So then the "workstation OS" gets to claim those people as users, but their main competition in that market is Microsoft Windows, which OS X loses the popularity contest to in the same way that OS X (including iOS) loses to Linux (including Android).

> The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything.

And at a stroke the entire history of Sun, Solaris and Sun OS is brushed under the carpet as though it never existed. Yes. I give up. You win. Workstations only exist because of Linux. I think I need a little lie down.

Because people think it's cool to just call it Linux and endlessly deride Stallman for insisting it be called GNU/Linux, even though the nuance is very important in discussions like this one.

I don't think Sun is responsible for Apple's choice of a Unix. I was around in the late 90s, and Linux really was an amazing workstation — far more so than a Sun, because the value for money ratio was incredibly good.

I also remember when OS X first came out (and before that, mklinux), and the selling point was that it was a Unix, like Linux.

I'd still rather have a Linux workstation than a Mac. Linux gets out of my way and lets me work. Solaris never did that (oh, the days of Solaris 'packages' …), and OS X still doesn't.