[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[A. P. Garcia via TUHS]

Damn, Clem. Lay down the truth. I really appreciate this perspective. It
grounds the idealism of ESR’s framing (and mine, to an extent) in the
practical realities of control and economics.


On Sat, Nov 1, 2025, 12:45 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>