The Case against Learning Unix Culture
Unix's durability and its technical culture are certainly of
interest to people who already like Unix, and perhaps to historians of
technology. But Unix's original application as a general-purpose
timesharing system for mid-sized and larger computers is rapidly
receding into the mists of history, killed off by personal
workstations. And there is certainly room for doubt that it will ever
achieve success in the mainstream business-desktop market now
dominated by
Microsoft.
Outsiders have frequently dismissed Unix as an academic toy or a
hacker's sandbox. One well-known polemic, the Unix Hater's
Handbook [Garfinkel], follows an
antagonistic line nearly as old as Unix itself in writing its devotees
off as a cult religion of freaks and losers. Certainly the colossal
and repeated blunders of
AT&T,
Sun, Novell,
and other commercial vendors and standards consortia in mispositioning
and mismarketing Unix have become legendary.
Even from within the Unix world, Unix has seemed to be teetering
on the brink of universality for so long as to raise the suspicion
that it will never actually get there. A skeptical outside observer's
conclusion might be that Unix is too useful to die but too awkward to
break out of the back room; a perpetual niche operatingsystem.
What confounds the skeptics' case is, more than anything else,
the rise of Linux and other open-source Unixes (such as the
modern BSD variants). Unix's culture proved too vital to be smothered
even by a decade of vendor mismanagement. Today the Unix community
itself has taken control of the technology and marketing, and is
rapidly and visibly solving Unix's problems (in ways we'll examine in
more detail in Chapter20).
