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What Unix Gets Right

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The explosive recent growth of Linux, and the increasing importance of the Internet, give us good reasons to suppose that the skeptics' case is wrong. But even supposing the skeptical assessment is true, Unix culture is worth learning because there are some things that Unix and its surrounding culture clearly do better than any competitors. Though the term “open source” and the Open Source Definition were not invented until 1998, peer-review-intensive development of freely shared source code was a key feature of the Unix culture from its beginnings. For its first ten years AT&T's original Unix, and its primary variant Berkeley Unix, were normally distributed with source code. This enabled most of the other good things that follow here. Unix is still the only operating system that can present a consistent, documented application programming interface (API) across a heterogeneous mix of computers, vendors, and special-purpose hardware. It is the only operating system that can scale from

What Unix Gets Right What Unix Gets Right Prev � Chapter�1.�Philosophy � Next What Unix Gets Right The explosive recent growth of Linux , and the increasing importance of the Internet, give us good reasons to suppose that the skeptics' case is wrong. But even supposing the skeptical assessment is true, Unix culture is worth learning because there are some things that Unix and its surrounding culture clearly do better than any competitors. Open-Source Software Though the term “open source” and the Open Source Definition were not invented until 1998, peer-review-intensive development

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