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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:55:58 -0500
From: Rob Wilkens <robw@optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Nvidia and its choice to read the GPL "differently"
In-reply-to: <1042255571.32431.43.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>,
       Larry Sendlosky <Larry.Sendlosky@storigen.com>,
       Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 22:26, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-01-11 at 02:07, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:58:44PM -0500, Rob Wilkens wrote:
> > > If I had been familiar with UNIX
> > > at the time I had those books, I might've written ROBIX ...
> > 
> > If I had ham, I could make ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.
> 
> Its not ham you need its utter arrogance and a complete lack of understanding
> that writing an OS is a seriously hard problem. There is a whole world of
> mysticism around the concept of a 'beginners mind' although to me
> "Im sorry nobody told me it was impossible" sums it up far better.

It depends what you're starting with, and what your goals are.

If your goal is to write an operating system that runs on all hardware
and does everything for everyone, then, yes, impossible would seem to
fit.

But what I was writing about specifically said that I've read the book
dissecting dos in the distant past, as mentioned, and the slightly
thicker book, writing your own 32-bit operating system, again in the
distant past, and I've written dos-based interrupt handlers to use a
mouse in a dos text app, and I've taken college courses in operating
systems design and implementation, and even back in 1996 I've taken a
course specifically on Linux implementation (a kernel hacking class).  

Had my goal at the time been as simple as Linus' goal was an been to
just get a simple terminal emulator and grow it slowly, I don't think
impossible would have described the task.  I think "a project that I do
in my spare time and show to nobody" would more likely have described
it.

-Rob

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