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All good things must come to an end. So it was with the public growth of 386BSD usage. Why?
It may have to do with origins and expectations being mismatched. 386BSD was not intended as
an omnibus project to "hack Berkeley Unix with", but to refine operating systems concepts.
This didn't please everybody. Early on, many contributions and effort was pushed to "explode"
rather than reduce complexity, often without justification other than "that's the way we do
it". In the mad rush to be the "one, true OS", apparently many didn't care about the minimalism
William and Lynne found the most essential part of the entire UNIX experience.
Our ambition was to revise and reduce the UNIX paradigm before explosive growth confused and
weakened the core structure with uncoordinated dependancies. Other work with the UNIX paradigm
has resulted in a more fragile, less robust system that weakens as it grows, because the
modular framework does not compartmentalize additions. Attempts by others like MACH or HURD
to accomplish this did not scale nor reduce the size of the problem, just moved it.
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