Re: Is Linux Unix?
Simon Kitching wrote:
On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 20:01, John Summerfield wrote:
It's not that no one likes the proposal. It's more of the "herding
cats" phenomenon. There's no consensus on how the release process
should work, it's hard to make a thousand scattered volunteers listen
anyway, and no one other than the current release manager is willing to
step up and actually try to manage the release...
I was thinking about that, thinking back to Mr Worthington, my history
teacher in the early 60s. Teaching me history then was a pretty
fruitless task, but I do recall that democracies don't provide efficient
governance.
They do in the long term. Name a system of government that has been more
efficient than democracy over a 100 year period. The most significant
The Roman Empire.
benefit is that plotting to overthrow the rulers is legal, permitted,
and expected. And that the retaliation by the rulers is constrained.
With every other kind of government, the paranoia of the leader causes
repression of the most able people around them, resulting in the
suppression of innovation of any sort. This still happens, of course, in
democracies, but the balance of power between the different factions
prevents it being taken too far.
Efficiency is getting decisions made. They don't have to be the _best_
decions, but once a decision is made, people can and will move in the
direction required by the decision.
In contrast, Debian makes a decision. Whoops. we didn't mean that. Let's
change it!
That's why we don't have democratic armies. While a democratic army is
planning the next battle, it would get cut to ribbons by the enemy.
Very few democracies that regularly use direct vote on issues
(referendums). The swiss one is the only one I know of.
Instead, representatives are selected. So the parallel would instead be
a system where a set of Generals were elected, and they then took the
necessary decisions.
They'd be lucky to get _competant_ generals that way. Witness the Roman
Republic. It's not quite how it worked, but similar.
Or elected _US judges:-)
_
An army where the Generals were elected would be an interesting one. A
little less mechanically effective, I suspect, but maybe also less prone
to the macho posturing that has been particularly *ineffective* in
recent times.
Debian is worse than a democracy, it's a democracy of hackers. No
managers at all, to speak of.
That's why people do this in their spare time. Hell, if Debian were full
of professional managers, I'd be using Slackware :-)
Hackers are good at cutting code. They don't like documentation - go
look for debian-installer documentation for example.
Hackers also by definition work on projects that aren't complete and are
evolving. There's a significant problem in trying to document stuff that
isn't complete and is evolving.
Still, I partially agree with you on this.
Umm. First lesson in project managment. Projects have defined
starting-points and defined end-points.
I once worked on some IBM projects. Documentation was part of the
project, and it can be written when the specs are done. That's not to
say it will be _complete_ then - it has to be adapted as the product is
changes as design errors are found and some of the fine detail evolves.
They don't like deadlines. "We'll release it when we're good and ready."
Hackers who show management talent are likely to go get lucrative jobs
managing. Managing the hosts of hackers here must be pretty thankless.
The ideal government, according to Mr Worthington, is a benevolent
dictatorship. A benevolent dictator's word is law, but he rules to the
benefit of those whom he rules. Taking advice is, of course, allowed and
good. So is making decisions.
Yes, except that a truly benevolent, tolerant and trusting dictator
won't last long. And one who isn't those things won't be a good ruler.
If te dictator is truly benevolent, & tolerant then there is no need to
overthrow him. How long since an English monarch was overthrown?
Instead, over centuries it's evolved into a democracy arguably better
than the American example.
Which would you prefer? the US model? or what you have?
That, I think, is about how the kernel works.
I would say the kernel development is more like a democracy; developers
"vote" by contributing to a particular kernel (BSD, Darwin, Linux,
Hurd). And so far Linus has proved to be a fine campaigner :-).
I'm sure that there's a fair bit of discussion (taking of advice), but
at the end, Linux (or his delegate) decides what goes in.
If there's enough dissention, the kernel will fork. In a sort of way, it
has - Red Hat has an enormous stream of patches it applies,and probabluy
SuSe and Mandrake have too, but for the most part the forked code
includes backported features (which will become standard features
sometime), and maybe experiemental code which can serve to test ideas
for the future.
--
Cheers
John
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