Benevolent Dictatorship

[Kragen]

On Fri, 20 Mar 1998, Chris Bitmead wrote:
> Personally I would like to see something that does the main
> things that we want even if it is appallingly slow, and awfully
> ugly and riddled with  hacks.  Once people understand what we're
> aiming for they will be motivated to make it elegant/fast. 

Well, yes.  Linux 1.x was never intended to be portable.  Significant
parts of it were written in assembly.  Lots of assumptions about the
x86 architecture were embedded in it.

Then folks started getting ants in their pants about porting it to the
Sparc and the Alpha.  Large parts of the kernel were rewritten, the
source tree was reorganized, and lots of old code was thrown out.

This was part of the 1.3.x development effort.  (But only a part of it!)

Incremental development is God in the open-source world.

Kragen