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The case against learning Unix culture
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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 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 presently 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 et al.] 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 mis-positioning and mis-marketing 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 operating system.
What confounds the skeptics' case is, more than anything else, the rise of Linux and other
open-source Unixes. 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.
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The durability of Unix
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楼主: haoji
发表于 2008-05-18 01:29