LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 22:16:32 +0930

Re: linux is not GNU/linux [was RedHat 7.1 reliability?]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 05:38:16PM -0400, Tim Fairchild wrote:
> 
> Okay, so is windows 9x an OS?  Is it DOS... or really sort of win/dos. It's 
> DOS underneath, but some win32 stuff working as well... 
> 
> If this was transferred to linux, it'd be a bit like calling KDE an OS. 

This is precisely what the US anti-trust trial was addressing.
First MS decided to integrate the windows layer into the OS
in wind95 (whereas in wind3.1 they were clearly separate), which
gave them the ability to exclude the DR-DOS OS and also
tended to exclude other windows systems.
Then they integrated the browser in wind98 to exclude Netscape.
They also integrated on-the-fly disk compression to cut out
third-party software for this purpose.
Now they're in the process of integrating all multimedia,
especially the copy prevention software. This will tend
to exclude MP3 files etc.

As I said earlier, device drivers are regarded as part of
the OS in the linux context, although they could be regarded
as third party applications software which just happens to
run in a kernel context.
And windows software and desktop environments could similarly
be regarded as device driver software.
So it _is_ valid to consider such software as part of the
operating system, since peripheral device control has always
been an important part of an OS, whose main function is
to provide memory-resident functions for the sharing and control
of all system resources. And the monitor is a system resource.

A browser could be regarded as part of the OS, because otherwise
one could not access that very important peripheral resource:
the Internet.

In a sense, it's all relative. Software is organised hierarchically
in layers. When you're working in one layer, everything below
that layer looks like an OS - or a "platform".


> Still confused as to whether mandrake is an OS tho :-)  In reality it's more 
> of a complete (ish) computing solution... with os included.


Maybe use of the expression "operating system" should be restricted
to software developers. In the marketing context, maybe
the word "platform" (which I hate) is more correct.
How about "the Mandrake platform"?
Hmmm. REally "the Mandrake distribution" sounds better.
Or "the Mandrake OS distribution".

Oh. And on this subject, my old Atari ST had the whole
operating system on EPROM.
In that case, one could argue that the OS was actually
part of the hardware. In a sense, there was no
operating system at all, in the sense of software
to be loaded from disk. (My old Atari had no hard disk anyway.)
And the Atari ST "operating sytem" included all of
the windows software too. Digital Research integrated
the windows layer into the "OS" long before MS 
"innovated" in this area.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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