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The Spirit Of Unix vs. The Unix Trademark
BSD Forums writes "This article conveys the message that Linux, BSD, and Darwin continue what Unix started. InfoWorld's Tom Yager says that several readers took him to task for referring to Linux, BSD, and OS X as Unix. He feels that Unix has a rich legacy that deserves to be preserved and accurately conveyed to new generations of computer scientists. It rattles many of us to see that the operating systems that best exemplify Unix traditions today aren't Unix at all."
One of the signs that a product has become a commodity is the use of a brandname as a generic description. Calling all modern, stable, portable, everything-is-a-file, my-great-grandfather-ran-on-32k-words-on-a-PDP-11 operating systems "UNIX" is technically inaccurate but culturally accurate.
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For everyone else, it looks like Unix, it acts like Unix, it smells like Unix. It's Unix.
It amazes me that Slashbots can criticize players like Microsoft for ignoring standards when it suits them, then turn around and do exactly the same thing themselves. Standards exist and are worth protecting because they make everyone's lives easier. If an OS is UNIX98 or POSIX compliant, then if means if you want to port your software to that platform, you can make certain assumptions before you start work that will vastly increase your chances of success within time and budget. And what "looks and smells" like Unix covers a wide range of ground, even Minix "looks and smells" a lot like Unix, but it simply doesn't have the capability of Linux let alone Solaris. An OS like OpenVMS isn't Unix, but you can compile and run plenty of Unix software on it, because of its POSIX API. NT with Cygwin can "look and smell" like Unix, but under the hood it's totally different.
If anyone can come along and write an OS that has $ as its prompt and you can type ls to get a list of files, does that make it a Unix? No, there's more to it than that. And that's why the Unix(r) brand exists.
I have long since taken the attitude that UNIX now stands as a model for an OS. Linux, openBSD, netBSD, Solaris and OSX are all implementations of that model. Each one has its differences and perculiarities, but they are all based on the UNIX model. The great thing about this is that once you understand the model, moving from between the different implementations is easy. And for every from of hardware there is a UNIX model OS. So you can UNIX anywhere.
One of the essential aspects of the UNIX model is 'openness', which promote clarity and understanding.
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Why? If you give away your coal, you don't have it any more. If you share a new idea, and we all follow your habit, then we all have so much more that the increase becomes qualitative rather than just quantitative, and we get the sort of emergent phenomena that have turned the market's paradigms upside-down.
"Unix" has come to mean more than the trademarked code of its current ownership corporation, and more than the trademarked code of its parent corporation. That change in meaning has occurred because of the way the the term has been used by the call-them-"generations" of programmers whose efforts and dedication to specific, commercially-unorthodox principles have been the direct cause of its dominance.
It's become a philosophy. Of course, the name of the philosophy is an old AT&T / Bell Labs, then Berkeley product name, but the right to control that trademark was lost when the companies that had the rights to the name in days long past made use of the genius of those for whom it became a philosophy. They got paid for their investment! They profited by letting it happen, and that's good. It's too late now to turn back the clock, and if they (AT&T, et al.) had kept "Unix" under lock and key as closely as a coal company must keep control of its coal, they would never have seen their brainchild become the core of much of the world's commerce and communication.
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
Open Source code is its own standard. Standards are for secretive companies, for companies that don't trust each other, and for monopolists.
Uhh, right. Let's take something simple, like SMTP or POP3. There are multiple implementations of these standards, from sendmail/popper to Exchange. If they don't conform to the same standard, no-one gets their email. But since they do, not only can email get from A to B, but you can feasibly replace one with the other. How does that benefit a monopolist in any way? You want to talk open source, what if sendmail and qmail don't use the same SMTP standard? What if Apache and Mozilla don't use the same HTTP standard? See, saying "the code is the standard" only works if there is only one implementation. For everything else, you need a neutral third party to make sure everyone plays by the rules.
There hasn't been much movement on formal standards, at least among Unices.
POSIX, NFS, DCE, CDE/Motif, X11, Kerberos, etc etc etc. How can you not have heard of these?
Any traditional (orthodox) Christian would say "You can't reinterpret Christianity, and still call it Christianity", "You can't pick and choose, and still call it Christianity", "You can't break up the whole, and still call it Christianity".
Tell that to Martin Luther.