[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

Hrrmph. IMO: This is trying to fit the data over the graph you want.

I never agreed with ESR's model.  Linux was (and continues to be) a
Cathedral.  It just has different master builders than BSD, SunOS, SVR4,
VMS, and NT did.

In all cases, there were two core drivers: 1.) control [he got to say what
was going to be there] and 2.) the economics of the time when each became
popular.

e.g., Richard Hamming's parody of Isaac Newton's famous quote: "Mathematicians
stand on each other's shoulders and computer scientists stand on each
other's toes,"  is the driver for each team; and the outcome is less driven
by design and architecture than it is by being *the most cost-effective
solution to something a user of the technology requires.*

On Sat, Nov 1, 2025 at 10:42 AM A. P. Garcia via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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.
>