[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[A. P. Garcia via TUHS]

I wanted to share three brief essays I wrote on LinkedIn. I hope it's
appropriate to share them here.

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Marketplace

People sometimes say Linux suffers from a “Not Invented Here” problem. They
pnt to technologies like DTrace and ZFS — born in Solaris, admired by
Linux, but never fully adopted. FreeBSD, macOS, even Windows embraced
DTrace. Linux went its own way, creating eBPF and Btrfs instead.

At first glance, it looks like stubbornness. But look closer, and you see a
deeper truth about how different systems and their communities evolve.

The Cathedral: Solaris and the Dream of Perfection

Solaris and the BSDs were cathedral projects: elegant, coherent, and built
to last. Their philosophy was architectural: design it perfectly once, and
maintain it forever. That stability made masterpieces like ZFS and DTrace
possible.

Cathedrals are slow to change. They preserve beauty, not momentum.

The Bazaar: Linux and the Art of Reinvention

Linux took the opposite path. Its ecosystem is messy, distributed, and
loud, a bazaar where competing ideas coexist until one wins by survival,
not decree. It doesn’t import technologies wholesale. It reinvents them
from first principles.

That’s why instead of adopting DTrace, Linux built eBPF, a programmable
virtual machine for tracing, networking, and observability. It’s more
complex, less elegant, but more adaptable.

This isn’t “Not Invented Here.” It’s “Invented Anew, Every Time.” It’s a
culture that prizes autonomy over elegance, vitality over symmetry.

The Marketplace: Microsoft and the Pragmatism of Scale

Then there’s Microsoft, once the cathedral’s rival, now a marketplace of
its own. Its genius has never been invention but absorption: taking good
ideas from elsewhere and integrating them into something cohesive.

PowerShell drew from Unix shells and .NET reflection. NTFS inherited DNA
from VMS. Today, Microsoft ships Linux inside Windows, Edge on Chromium,
and hosts GitHub — the beating heart of open source.

Yet the uptake of Microsoft’s own open-source tools among Linux users has
been modest. You can install PowerShell on Ubuntu or .NET on Debian, but
few do. Not because the tools are bad, but because open source isn’t just a
license, it’s a language.

Microsoft’s tools still speak in the idioms of Windows. They solve problems
that feel foreign in Unix hands. You can open-source the code, but you
can’t open-source the culture overnight.

Three Philosophies, One Ecosystem

-  Solaris / BSD: Design it perfectly, then preserve it.
-  Linux: Rebuild it constantly, and let it evolve.
-  Microsoft: Adopt it broadly, and make it familiar.

Each model has its genius, and its limits. Solaris gave us clarity but
stagnated. Linux gave us chaos but endurance. Microsoft gave us cohesion,
and at times, a touch of the blasé.

But in 2025, the walls between them have thinned. Linux runs in Azure. eBPF
runs on Windows. Solaris’s spirit lives on in every file system that
promises self-healing storage.

The world has evolved since ESR first told us about the Cathedral and the
Bazaar.



Before the Bazaar
The lineage of open collaboration from Bell Labs to the AI Lab to Linux.

In the early days, Unix was a community. Not a corporate product or a
stealth research project, but a loose fellowship of programmers trading
code through tape reels. Thompson and Ritchie gave it away for a nominal
fee, and universities adopted it because it was small, elegant, and
instructional. The code moved by post and by modem; ideas moved even
faster. Every new utility carried someone’s initials in the source
comments, a quiet signature of a gift freely given.

Meanwhile, at MIT, another tribe of hackers lived by a similar rhythm,
though they worked on different machines. Their home was the AI Lab, and
their world ran on PDP-10s under ITS, a timesharing system they had shaped
to their own image. It was a place where curiosity outranked hierarchy,
where anyone could read or patch any program, and where a clever hack was
its own kind of currency.

For a while, both cultures thrived on openness. But while the Unix world
diffused into hundreds of campuses and companies, the AI Lab was a more
fragile ecosystem. When the hardware aged and the market closed in, that
ecosystem broke. What had been an everyday freedom, editing each other’s
code, suddenly became trespass.

The lab was dying, and everyone could feel it. The old PDP-10s hummed like
relics, and the laughter that used to spill from the terminals had thinned
to the occasional keystroke. A printer driver had been locked away behind a
corporate contract; a colleague left for a company that paid him to keep
quiet. The code that once bound the room together was vanishing into sealed
disks and nondisclosure.

Richard Matthew Stallman stood in the middle of that silence and made a
decision that would outlast the machines. If the lab was gone, he would
build another. One not bound by walls or employers. One where the source
itself would be the meeting place.

For all the talk of freedom you may have heard from rms, GNU wasn’t born
from utopia; it was born from grief. It was his hope that a community could
be written back into existence, line by line.

Before him, long before the Internet turned collaboration into a torrent,
there was a room at Bell Labs Center 1127. That was the first bazaar:
quiet, fluorescent, lined with a PDP-11 and teletype terminals. The people
who used Unix were the same ones who built it.

When Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie wrote a tool, it wasn’t for customers;
it was for the colleague one door down. Brian Kernighan would stop by with
an idea for a text filter. Joe Ossanna needed better document formatting.
Doug McIlroy wanted to teach the machines how to speak in little,
composable verbs. By lunchtime, half the lab was using the new tool, and by
evening, someone else had improved it.

The same impulse stretches now across continents instead of offices. The
bazaar simply scaled up the Unix room: at Bell Labs, at the AI Lab at MIT,
and now in your every git pull.



The Rhetoric of the Bazaar

How Eric S. Raymond sold open source as a process improvement.

When The Cathedral and the Bazaar appeared in the late 1990s, it read like
field notes from a new frontier. Raymond seemed to be explaining why
Linux’s sprawling, volunteer army had outpaced corporate software. But the
essay was more than observation. It was persuasion dressed as ethnography,
a cultural revolution disguised as engineering advice.

The narrow slogan

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

The line became gospel. Short, clever, and apparently scientific, it
reduced open collaboration to a form of distributed debugging. Many eyes,
fewer bugs. Collaboration, in this light, was not a creative act but a
safety net.

It was a perfect slogan for the audience he needed. Managers could measure
defects. Executives could chart release velocity. You could sell that to a
boardroom. “Open source fixes bugs faster” sounds like efficiency; “open
source changes how humans organize” sounds like insurrection.

The trade

So Raymond made a trade. He gave up the movement’s breadth for credibility.
The grand claim, that transparency breeds better design and deeper
understanding, became a smaller, safer one about quality assurance. And in
doing so, he made the revolution sound replicable.

It worked. Netscape opened its code. “Open source” replaced “free
software.” Corporations joined the bazaar without ever entering the
community. They adopted the method, not the meaning.

The diary as proof

Even the long detour through fetchmail fits the pattern. It reads like
autobiography, but it’s really evidence: if this model works for me, it can
work for you. The diary is a case study, not merely an exposition. Raymond
wasn’t just documenting open development. He was demonstrating it.

The legacy

The quiet compromise of the essay is that by focusing on bugs instead of
ideology, Raymond made the unfamiliar familiar. He turned rebellion into
best practice. And in doing so, he helped open source escape the lab and
enter the market—but also stripped it of its soul.

It split the movement. The free software camp clung to ethics; the open
source camp to efficiency. Each accused the other of missing the point.

Perhaps both did.

The real power of the bazaar wasn’t in its license or its process. It was
in the way it made people feel seen, the way a thousand strangers could
build something together and call it theirs. That’s what made the terminals
hum and the mailing lists sing.

The real birth wasn’t a method or a manifesto. It was a new community, just
another example of what happens when people share a common need and work
together to make it happen. And it didn’t belong to either banner. It
belonged to everyone who showed up.