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Could Unix Happen Today?
- johnklos 5y agoThe real question is whether Unix could come from a corporation. Unix came from Bell Labs through somewhat circuitous paths - it wasn't a planned product, or even a planned project. I see too many examples of OSes that compete with themselves to imagine that any of them, even using all of the lessons available from Unix and VMS, gaining widespread acceptance.
- bitwize 5y ago> "It was not, ‘Here’s what you have to do, and every quarter tell us what you’ve done.’ It was more like, ‘Oh gee, you’re doing that? That sounds really interesting! Why don’t you keep doing it as long as it looks good.'" It also wasn't "So where are we on that piping story? Is that something that can be wrapped up this sprint, or do we have to carry it over into the next sprint?" I think the idea of building an OS to foster a community is Unix's enduring legacy. Its API has unfixable warts, and C needs to be deprecated and phased out completely in favor of something like Rust. So if Unix qua Unix, with all its baggage and legacy cruft, couldn't happen today, maybe that's a good thing, but it'd be a shame if we couldn't make the same kind of "communitarian OS" happen again. The kicker is, in today's environment, where every developer is being measured by the (dollar) value they contribute to their employer, I don't think we could.
- hulitu 5y ago> Could Unix Happen Today? No. You need to learn from the past and improve things. Those things are missing today. The only thing in SW which gets improved everyday is bloat.