Re: We know what you need, and we'll push it down your throat.

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2006/12/28]

> I don't know exactly how .NET is controlled, but when a definition is
> publicly defined, the control only affects your ability to call the
> definition with your changes a ".NET version", not your ability to make
> changes.

I merely need to cite MS-DOS and Win32 as a counterexample.

> For example, I think most people today mean "C89", not "C99" when they say "C". 

I mean "the language documented in Kernighan and Ritchie's 'The C Programming
Language', and it successors". And that's one of the reasons it is (at this
time) an open system... there were within a couple of years of the publishing
of that book multiple independant implementations that people were using.

Creating an open system is not necessarily easy. It requires a lot of work
to factor out implementation details from requirements, and to expose
interfaces that provide the functionality you need without tying you to
an underlying relation. The result of this process may appear deceptively
simple, but that simplicity does not correspond to a lack of functionality.

I'm not going to repeath the length of my last two messages here.

I'll just note a few things.

1. Perl is not an open system. There's only one source tree for Perl, and
the API is still under Larry Wall's control.

2. If you understood open systems it wouldn't occur to you to wonder what "the
UNIX" was.

3. The biggest reason that Unix is an open system may be that AT&T was legally
prohibited from being a "vendor", so they had no reason for trying to lock the
users in. Why it's open isn't as important as the fact that it is:

4. Once a system is open it can not be closed again. A closed system can be
kept closed, even while pretending to be open.

5. Windows didn't win the desktop market, it *inherited* the desktop market
and merely failed to lose it.

6. In 1986, I was working on an IBM PC/AT that I could boot into either
MS-DOS or Xenix. The only thing MS-DOS did that was faster was boot. Everything
else from file access to application launch through execution was faster on
Xenix.

7. The OS isn't the kernel.

• Yossi Kreinin 17:42 on 28 Dec 2006
  • peter (Peter da Silva) 18:10 on 28 Dec 2006
    • Abigail 10:37 on 29 Dec 2006
      • too deep to show

Generated at 03:02 on 01 Jan 2007 by mariachi 0.52