RE: Innovation in software (was RE: IBM loses its Unix license -Jun. 16, 2003)

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Tom Liotta wrote:

> >It is innovation that is the issue (that's what we were talking about,
> >right?).
>
> I thought it was innovation at the OS level.

> >  I would disagree that unix helped spur the internet, I think
> >that by and large unix was and is the internet.  Think about it.  What
> >until very recently was the largest volume traffic?  email.  Mostly
> >handled by sendmail or some other unix program. ...
> >  DNS?  handled by BIND ...  Web
> >servers ...  NCSA httpd and apache ...
> >IRC, IM, etc. ...  FTP? ...
> >  Newsgroups? ...  telnet,
> >ssh, pop (server), whois ...
>
> ...and aren't all of those applications?

That is a good point.  It brings up the question, "What is an operating
system?"  Some people consider the OS to be only those parts that execute
in kernel-space.  But since you can't do anything with just a kernel, some
would argue that the OS is the kernel plus programs needed to do
something.  But what "something"?  Some would argue that the OS includes
the many servers, like those listed above.  And some would argue that the
OS includes client applications like a web browser (guess who).

Whatever you decide, the innovation of these services drove innovation at
other levels - better routing, new ways of looking at kernel/user space,
performance, reliability features, etc.

Perhaps (and this is really only intended as an idea to pursue
thoughtfully) an operating system can be defined appropriately as all the
software that can only run on a given system.  Thus, many of the services
listed above would be part of the "unix OS" since that was, at the time,
the only platform they ran on (note I said many of the services, not all).
That would obviously no longer be true.  This definition then leads us to
say the RPG is part of the OS/400 OS, since it only runs on that platform.
This doesn't work too well, since many of us write RPG applications that
only run on the iSeries, but are not considered by anyone to be part of
the OS.  Nevertheless, the idea has some merit.

>>From: James Rich
>>
>>Free software is perhaps the greatest innovation we have yet seen.

(Responding to Joe and Hans who both disagreed with the above statement I
made, with good reasons to disagree)

Let me clarify that as the formalization of free software.  I recognize
that that happened some years ago.  But this formalization was something
that had never been done before, and is provided a much needed
organization for the free software efforts that already existed.

Conversly, perhaps the worst innovation was the draconian licenses
developed by proprietary software developers.  Not to say that
proprietary software is draconian, but that some licenses have become
draconian as they developed.

Either that is the worst innovation or the talking paper clip is ;)

James Rich