From: richb@jti.com (Richard Braun)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: It's installed, now what?  (was Re: A flight of marketing fancy)
Date: 9 Jan 93 19:28:53 GMT
Organization: Jupiter Technology Inc. / Waltham, MA

tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) writes:
>Actually, the approach taken by Project Athena and Linux are quite
>different.  Project Athena was written in exactly one place: at MIT.
>Linux is being developed all over the world.  The goals of Project
>Athena was did not include taking over the world (although that would
>have been nice), and so the fact that there weren't a lot of spinoffs
>isn't that important.

My point wasn't about geography, it was about development philosophy;
it's wise for those of us who are now (or are considering) contributing
to Linux to remember that a system like this could have "big tent"
appeal to far more people if the development isn't accompanied by too
much religious dogma.  (E.g., we'll make software developers happy now
and we'll get to the rest later, etc.)

>I should mention, though, that the Athena environment has been exported
>to other sites; it is not true that it is only running at MIT.  You can
>buy it from DEC as "DECathena", and there have been a couple of other
>sites which have picked up the Athena distribution and set it up on their
>own.  Granted, not a lot, but there are some.

A couple of years before Athena started, my own alma mater (the
University of Delaware) set up something called the Office for Computer
Based Instruction; it was an offshoot of the Plato academic environment
developed at CDC and the University of Illinois.  Like Athena, it had
ambitious goals which didn't include "taking over the world".  Essentially
the point was to revolutionize computer-based teaching, and indeed Athena
also took a stab at this.  Plato was installed at 15-20 sites around the
world before it collapsed like a dinosaur (you needed a $5 million
computer to run it), so it did fulfill a moderate sized niche for a
while.  Anyway, I digress:  compared with the contribution made thus far
by the Free Software Foundation, both Athena and OCBI haven't seen similar
success.

I didn't post to denigrate the fine work done by Athena developers,
only to point out that if you want top-quality software to realize its
fullest potential, you must not only implement it well but you also
have to satisfy the needs of a large base of users and make them aware
of your efforts.  Not an easy problem to solve.

>Anyway, I digress.  I also think it is misleading for people to say that

>I don't particularily care whether or not Linux ever supplants MS-DOS or
>OS/2.  I'm not an ideologue like some of the people at the FSF are.  So
>if Linux is only used by just the hackers, that's O.K.

Here we disagree.  At my most recent job, and even to a certain extent
at my current one, I had an ongoing struggle over universal information
access.  Too often, an organization will set up islands of connectivity
and/or functionality.  Then you have one set of people using one set of
tools, happily ignoring the other set of people using different ones.
It hurts efficiency and puts artificial divisions between people when
"you can't get there from here".

Something really neat about the U.S. highway system, if you think about it,
is that from any address you can drive to *any* other address using any
type of car.

OS/2, MS-DOS, Unix, and Linux are like cars:  different ways of getting
places.  But right now they're all on different continents and the ferries
are rather expensive and/or tedious.  (OK, that's enough of this analogy!)

I'd like to see Linux interoperate well with DOS, OS-2, Unix, and any
other popular system, handling network connectivity, data file
formats, file systems, program execution, ease of administration, and
so on.  By doing so, it'll find a bigger niche, and Linux hackers
won't be off in some separate virtual corner of the planet.  It's got
a great start, and my postings should be taken as encouragement in
this direction, not bashing, since I have yet to learn who many of the
developers are.

-rich