Wednesday, May 03, 2006

bsdtalk038 - Interview with Eric S. Raymond

Interview with Eric S. Raymond.

File info: 8MB, 17 minutes.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great interview .
Sound works little crapy but still I figour out the 99% of show.

Interview Theo !

(http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550)

Anonymous said...

Have been seeing the "interview Theo" thingy quite a while when I remember that you said you already asked him and the reply was that he was too busy at the moment...Maybe some people missed that.

Maybe this will make them happy?

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550

Anonymous said...

Ok
So maybe good idea is interview pjd@freebsd.org (Pawel Jakub Dawidek) ,He is working on UFS jurnaling file system ,it could be interesting ...

Anonymous said...

Great internview.

One of the best so far.
Just wondering if you could add a little input on your thoughs of what is going on in BSD News.

Joseph Koshy said...

In this interview ESR claims that the BSD OSes are prone to 'fragmentation' while the Linux (kernel) is not. Even ignoring the apples-to-oranges comparision being attempted, I wonder how he defines 'fragmentation'.

If there are multiple organizations taking responsibility for code with a common heritage and if their code bases have significantly diverged (in the sense that "diff -ru" or the output of "cvs log" shows non-trivial divergences), one can reasonably assume that development on the original code base has 'fragmented'.

By this measure though, the development of the Linux family of kernels is quite fragmented, with many distro vendors and special interest groups publishing and maintaining their own versions of the kernel code base.

Perhaps what ESR meant was that the Linux brand is less fragmented than that of the BSDs?

jester said...

I agree with the previous comment. It struck me as very strange when he mentioned fragmentation of the BSDs because I've always thought of Linux as being far more fragmented.

If 'fragmented' means 'more forks' then I suppose the BSDs would be more fragmented. As far as I understand, there is only one Linux kernel and there are four major BSDs that I know of (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD).

But wait... there kinda isn't just one Linux kernel because every distribution applies their own changes and patches to it. BSD 'distributions' like PC-BSD, FreeSBIE, etc are really just configurations of userland stuff - they don't change the kernel or base system.

Maybe this is totally inaccurate - I don't honestly know that much about the Linux world - but it seems that Linux is about fragmentation while BSD is more about unity. This interpretation seems to make sense too - there are far fewer BSD developers and if everything really was fragmented, I don't think any of them would make any significant progress.

As was suggested, how we name things plays a big role in how people interpret things. I bet they wouldn't sell nearly as many Cadillacs if they just stamped Chevrolet on them and didn't bother giving them a separate name.