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If UNIX Were a Religion
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Charles Stross has written a very clever article where he describes the religious metaphor he uses with non-technical folks to explain the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX. There is one true religion in operating systems says Stross and it is UNIX although there's also an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy. If MULTICS is Judaism then UNIX is Christianity. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX which is probably POSIX. Stross says that today the biggest church in the whole of UNIX is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but "has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path." But lo, in the late 1980s, UNIX succumbed to the sins of venality, demanding too much money from the faithful and so, in 1991 Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. 'The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists.' More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux. 'Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google.' Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. 'Is that clear?'"
Whilst Torvalds is Calvin - the one who pulled the logic of the previous reformers together to create a complete system.
Of course it will be useless for you if you already have some understanding of the UNIX heritage. As with all metaphors, its value is for people who know very little about the topic, in that it helps them relating the topic to something which they're already familiar with.
For someone without a previous knowledge in the history of UNIX, the metaphor provides a mental map to navigate intuitively what was perceived as an impenetrable technical mess. It can provide the idea that there is a heritage of branching from a common origin, a sense of what are the main branches, their relative antiquity and importance.
Moreover, it's funny and light-hearted. Why does everything has to have a practical purpose?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
If Unix is Christianity, then RMS is Westboro Baptist Church.
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I'd say I like the analogy to LINUX as Protestant splintering from the church of AT&T, though I'm wondering why nobody brought up that BeOS splintered with more forward looking features and ended up being led by a homicidal albino bent on mayhem.
We took a rancorous subject where people just argue, and we added religious debate to it, just in case someone wasn't going to get their jammies in a wad. We should also add in that Windows doesn't believe in Global Warming, and Al Gore prefers the Mac. Glenn Beck is out in a hidden location somewhere in the Utah desert right now preaching Ubuntu to rebellious children waiting for the end times.
I don't however, see much use in these analogies, because they detract from the much better "If an Operating System Drove Your Car" metaphor; http://www.computerjokes.net/027.asp
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Scientology? That one's easy.
- Requires large amounts of money to spent to stay within the faith
- Founder, now dead, revered by followers
- People rarely encounter this as their first religion, but when they switch to it, they can't shut up about it.
- Largely a rehash of pre-existing stuff, presented in a new way (in this case, pulp science fiction presented as a religion)
Mac OS X. We have a winner.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
According to Microsoft,
"Though shalt not have any OS's other than Microsoft"
"Though shalt not covet thy neighbor's more stable and faster OS"
"Though shalt spend one day a week defragging, scanning, and fixing thy Microsoft OS"