Overview

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.

Oscar Wilde

If you listen to the marketing messages of most software companies today, you will find that each espouses its own particular path to software utopia: "Our solutions integrate systems"; "Our process accelerates the development cycle"; "Our graphical user interface gets you going quickly"; "Run your database applications at lower cost." There is no doubt that they have spent countless hours and mountains of dollars rationalizing their approaches. They make their arguments sound pretty convincing. And many of them have killed more trees getting their messages out than we've bulldozed to make room for housing.

I'm no oracle, but I have made a simple observation. The Unix operating system and its concomitant philosophy have been around for more than 25 years. In an industry where the pace of innovation is constantly accelerating, it is most unusual that a single approach to system design and software architecture has endured for so long. Not only has it weathered the storms of thousands or perhaps millions of critics, it continues to thrive and is still gaining ground today. In fact, as the latest incarnation of Unix, Linux stands to overwhelm the world's largest software monopoly in the near future.

About every 10 years or so, a major paradigm shift has hit the computer world. In the early 1960s, mainframe computing was staunchly entrenched in computer labs everywhere. Then, in the 1970s minicomputers and timesharing engendered...