[arch-general] A universal Operating System API - why don't we have it?

Ryan Sims rwsims at gmail.com
Mon Dec 21 10:47:50 EST 2009


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:24 AM, RedShift <redshift at pandora.be> wrote:
> Hi all
>
>
> It dawned on my that lots of industries have standards and companies
> generally keep to them. For example slabs of aluminium have standard sizes,
> building materials have well defined specifications, or take electrical
> components: there's a huge list of standardized components. You can expect
> between 220 and 240 VAC from your wall socket, fuses have standard formats
> and ratings, 1 meter here is exactly the same as 1 meter in another country,
> etc... Even CD's, which have been around for decades by now, have always
> been created using the same format (albeit extended somewhat, over time, but
> a normal CD pressed now should still play in a CD player that's 20 years
> old).
>
> It allows for a very competitive market where choices are made based on
> price, quality, availability, etc...

I look at it this way: an OS is a *tool,* whereas electricity, CDs and
such are commodities, and need to be fungible. Tools are *not*
fungible; the way you interface with a tool is very tightly coupled
with the purpose of that tool, which is why you should never use a
hammer to pull a screw. The abstractions OSs (and also programming
languages) present represent what they're designed to do, so making a
one-size-fits-all tool is worse than useless. The "desktop wars" and
such arguments all commit the fallacy that OSs are a pretty shell over
computer hardware, whereas they are (or should be) tools targeted at
(more or less) specific solutions.

-- 
Ryan W Sims


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