[TUHS] AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

Wishful thinking.  An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts.  It
was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
developers.  Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.

They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
dead in that very few people use them.

Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> Hi Larry,
> 
> I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
> fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
> line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
> much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
> That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
> bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
> ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
> CORE, try that with SCALE :).
> 
> It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
> they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
> gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
> 
> Will
> 
> On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> >kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> >
> >It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
> >Linux seem like the future.
> >
> >As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> >the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> >hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> >
> >On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> >>I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> >>
> >>Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> >>
> >>- Matt G.
> >>
> >>------- Original Message -------
> >>On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> >>>to free.
> >>>
> >>>On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> >>>>in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> >>>>This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> >>>>was crazy, but he was right.
> >>>>
> >>>>arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> >>>>>
> >>>>>FYI.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Arnold
> >>>
> >>>--
> >>>---
> >>>Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat