The future of Unix is full of difficult problems. Would we
truly want it any other way?
For more than thirty years we have thrived on challenges. We
pioneered the best practices of software engineering. We created
today's Internet and Web. We have built the largest, most complex,
and most reliable software systems ever to exist. We outlasted the
IBM monopoly and we're
making a run against the
Microsoft monopoly
that is good enough to deeply frighten it.
Not that everything has been triumph by any means. In the 1980s
we nearly destroyed ourselves by acceding to the proprietary capture
of Unix. We neglected the low end, the nontechnical end users, for
far too long and thereby left
Microsoft an
opening to grossly lower the quality standards of software.
Intelligent observers have pronounced our technology, our community,
and our values to be dead any number of times.
But always we have come storming back. We make mistakes, but we
learn from our mistakes. We have transmitted our culture across
generations; we have absorbed much of what was best from the early
academic hackers and
the ARPANET experimenters and the microcomputer enthusiasts and a
number of other cultures. The open-source movement has resurrected
the vigor and idealism of our early years, and today we are stronger
and more numerous than we have ever been.
So far, betting against the Unix hackers has always been
short-term smart but long-term stupid. We can prevail — if we
choose to.
