Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!]

Timothy Miller
2003-04-30T18:04:57Z

Larry McVoy wrote:
>
>
> My point wasn't about theft, it was about reimplementation.
> I stand behind that point, what I've seen for more than a decade is
> reimplementation after reimplementation. I'm not saying there is no
> value to that or that it is illegal or that there are no improvements
> (compare Unix diff to GNU diff if you want to see some imrovements).
> There is tons of value in having free versions of useful tools.
> There is also tons of value in the creation of new work.
>

Here's my example:

Years ago, I realized that when you used malloc(), your process size
would increase (of course), but when you used free(), your process size
would not shrink. This is still the case under Solaris. I understand
why it is the case, but I always wondered why someone didn't do
something to improve it. I mean, what a lazy, broken way of doing things.

Recently, I came to realize that glibc's implementation is really smart
about it and releases free'd memory back to the system. Wow! What
commercial vendor would EVER do something that intelligent? Under
Solaris, we had to do weird stuff involving mmap to get memory that we
could release back to the system. It was a pain. glibc does it
automatically!

Now, I have come to realize this because this 'intelligence' in glibc is
being a major thorn in my side. I wrote a program which relied on the
lazy behavior, and the performance is being killed by the overhead of
releasing the memory back to the system. But being a thorn in my side
doesn't make that improvement any less cool or genuinely unique to the
open source community.

A lot of times, what you'll see from commercial vendors is a set of
tools that work well. But only just well enough. They don't go out of
their way to improve things. They give you the same version of diff and
the same basic functionality from libc for years and years on end. The
open source community says, "You know what? This is lame. I'm going to
fix it and make it more useful for everyone."

More and more, people where I work are switching over to using
GNU/Linux/x86 workstations rather than any of the alternatives,
primarily because the development environment and the basic tools are
just SO MUCH BETTER. (Sure, Sun's Workshop comes with some great
graphical tools, but who uses them? And it's expensive anyhow.)

I mean, when will Sun, IBM, or Compaq ever start shipping tcsh or bash
as the default shell? Don't they realize that people make typos and
would like to reedit the line they just typed? Why are they still in
the dark ages?