On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Chris Nehren <cnehren+tuhs@pobox.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 14:52:12 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> But nostalgia aside, something I find interesting (and frankly a bit
> distressing) is what seems to me to simply be an acceptance that it's all
> going to end with Linux.  That is to say, no one ever seems to talk about
> what will come *after* Linux.  Will Linus's kernel truly be the last kernel
> anyone works on seriously?  Somehow I very much doubt that.  And yet, you
> don't see a lot of talk about evolutionary paths beyond Linux; it's a sort
> of tunnel vision.

You (specifically) don't see a lot of evolutionary paths beyond
Linux because you're not looking for them.

Well, without knowing me or a thing about me, that's a strong statement.

There is a lot of innovation happening in illumos and BSD. 
[snip]

This is my point.  s/Linux/(Illumos|.*BSD)/ and the point remains largely the same.

These aren't new systems trying out fundamentally new ideas; they're making incremental improvements on things that have come before.  That's all well and good (and it's nice to have an alternative to Linux specifically), but building on a nearly 50 year old framework isn't particularly innovative, despite claims to the contrary.  Now don't get me wrong, that framework remains wildly useful, and so that work has value, but my question is more generally whether anyone has the kind of drive to come up with the sort of next generation system that Unix represented when Unix was new?  Things like Plan 9 and Akaros are more along the lines of what I was thinking of: mentioning *BSD or other such systems reinforces my thesis.

        - Dan C.