What’s all the noise about?

(I stumbled upon this blog while checking why tracker indexing fails consistently for me).

Most ideas for every feature, little and/or great, imho came from the world of GNU/Linux and the open source community.

That’s as far from the truth as possible actually. If anything linux has lagged behind OS X (and Windows) in the ideas game in many respects and at all levels, and to make matters worse that rings true even at the kernel/systems programming level. Take for example the scheduler — which up until a few years ago and despite linux’s performance advantages over xnu at the time, still performed miserably on a large class of (desktop) applications and there was no interest (and few ideas) in making it better.

Yes, it’s true that *some* great ideas stem from open source communities around the world; yet many amazing ideas first appear in commercial applications. And many more *usable* realisations of those ideas come from commercial organisations.

But in any case, you’ve completely missed the point; hourback talked about *innovation*. Having a great idea does not qualify as innovation, and most definitely not what hourback was talking about; ideas are cheap, implementations/products cost. Innovation is having/getting a great idea and actually making it reality. And in this respect, Apple — of all companies — has been leading in some areas for years now. Linux, on the other hand, is not exactly what I’d call ‘innovative’. It’s fun for geeks, it’s free and it’s also flexible. But innovative? Hardly. Desktop compositing came too late to linux and its still not properly integrated into the main APIs; the graphics subsystem sucked for ages under the XFree86 governance and the miserable driver support; it’s still lagging behind OS X and Windows for many of the same reasons.

For the record (and because you’re clearly confused here): Quartz compositing was out much earlier than anything else like it (2001) and I think you’re confused because compositing on linux appeared after 2005.

Linux hasn’t had a proper filesystem indexing/searching tool, despite the good intentions and efforts of the people behind tracker/beagle/whatever. None whatsoever. None of them work right. Mac OS X has had a very basic tool with Spotlight in Tiger since 2005 that has kept getting better and better and that is an integral part of the OS X experience. Despite having a difficult start, it works great nowadays. Rate of progress? Innovation? OS X wins I think.

That’s exactly the case with launchd and UpStart. launchd is innovative, in that it’s a great idea with a functioning implementation (with its quirks and limitations, as with everything). UpStart has shown some great promise, but its features are not even documented, let alone implemented. Is UpStart innovative? No way, it’s as close to vapourware as possible. Is launchd innovative ? Absolutely! Since 2005 it’s provided millions of people with faster boot, unified service management and a robust, dependable codebase.

Last, but not least, is the concept of openness that the linux community seems to dislike; it’s not bad to accept that someone did something better than you; that’s exactly what Apple did when they created Darwin or when they took KHTML and made Webkit. If Ubuntu used launchd it would not only provide a better solution to its users, but it would get an opportunity to make launchd even better. That is if it could find someone to work on it faster than the rate UpStart is worked upon that is =)

However, linux always seem to fail to make it *good for not-geeks*. Why should a spare-time programmer who makes a tool for himself and for his (technologically) equals care about “regular users” after all.

The ideas, though are not Apple’s nor Microsoft’s. Most ideas for every feature, little and/or great, imho came from the world of GNU/Linux and the open source community.

Now, you describe your issues with launchd, when using it as a cron replacement (I also think that you exaggerate and that although the 60-second delay is a nuissance, it is a very minor one, especially compared to everything else out there; but that’s just my opinion).

Anyway you cut it, whether you had trouble creating a single-line shell script or not, whether you found launchd too complex or undocumented, there can be no comparison to Upstart; and that was precisely the point of the article; not that launchd is the best possible system and certainly not that it doesn’t have its problems. It’s just years ahead of Upstart and will probably remain so as long as Upstart keeps improving at the rate it does.

My point is that it’s easier to discuss about then actually use it.