YDL 4.0

[Walt Pawley]

On 8/23/04 8:06 PM -0400, Arch wrote on YDL 4.0

>This forum has had several discussions over the last months about the
>impending (and evidently much anticipated) YDL 4.0 release.   I am a little
>confused -- why do we care?

Ah. An old bull.  ;-)

A long time ago, in a career fair away, I once wrote operating system
software for and an oddly not quite yet extinct marque. I didn't do it
because I worked for the company (in any of its guises). I did it because
we could not stand to have them breaking our code with every new release.

An interesting phenomena arose out of the decision to do this. Despite
working entirely on my own with old software, when I attending national
user group meetings I found people constantly hounding the vendor for
functions which we'd long started taking for granted. More importantly, our
systems no longer broke routinely which meant our manufacturing plants
actually started working.

I tried to relate the notion to my fellow attendees that were they to quit
expecting the vendor to solve all their problems by "improving" the OS,
they might actually solve their problems by using OS that really worked.
Despite the evidence that it could readily enough be done, no one seemed to
care. I can sort of understand the perspective of the OS vendor since the
vendor makes money by churning the OS and providing "support", at least,
theoretically. I can see where an IT department of a large company might
well be motivated to wish for a constantly changing foundation for what
they're supposed to be doing as well. But the rest of us just need to have
things that work well, every time we fire them up. We need time to learn
what they're about so we can use them reasonably.

One of the attractions of Unix things for me is that as much as they
change, they have classically been standards based and thus inclusive of a
stable minimum functionality. Such is the stuff to build upon. Sadly, I
suspect that this property is going to leave us in newer versions as time
goes by. Too much money can be had by breaking what works and selling
people "new" solutions to old problems which have been well solved with
what was "old". We've even created a culture that seems little interested
in actually using the products they buy but rather replacing them as
quickly as possible with the latest thing. I believe we refer to it as
being fashionable.

Somehow, I don't think YDL 4.0 is going to be that sort of thing. Not that
there won't be (and aren't already) many amongst us who can't resist the
siren of fashionability that will accompany it. I suspect YDL 4.0 is more
about making a alternate form of Unix available on the latest Macs than
anything else.

    Another old bull

-- 
Walter M. Pawley <walt@wump.org>
Wump Research & Company
676 River Bend Road, Roseburg, OR 97470
         541-672-8975