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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?'"
If it was a religion? if???
I didn't realise this was up for a debate about this.
Now I'm going to fetch my copy of the old testament (ANSI version) and read a few verses.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oh lookie, a navel-gazing extended, tortured analogy, and even worse, an unfunny to say nothing of uninsightful one.
What would BeOS and Haiku be listed as? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I guess that explains why I always feel the urge to do a security audit before Yom Kippur.
I guess Arch Linux (my current OS of choice) doesn't fit in this ungodly mess of doctrines, with the gluttonous pacman and all.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
It was Andrew Tanenbaum who showed the initiative to create a UNIX compatible royalty free OS for the purpose of teaching, Torvalds Linux is surely a derivative of that initiative if not a direct derivative of the Minix book which inspired him. Torvalds deserves a lot of credit for Linux but i think Tanenbaum deserves to have the credit for enabling so many people to learn about UNIX like systems without paying absurd amounts to AT&T.
Must be Windows, maybe just the church of windows ME.
That took elements common to Judaism and Christianity and fused them into an aggressive hegemonising philosophy that brooked no opposition. Where does that fit into the anology?
(Having only read the summary, I don't know if Stross had the nerve to bring them in to the discussion for fear of upsetting people. They can be very touchy at times...)
http://blog.aegisub.org/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html
The analogy is a logical one, since religion is a form of software.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Buddhism? Hinduism? Scientology? Rastafarianism?
(One can't say Islam, b'cos whereas Islam spread wherever it could, Windows largely refused to leave its x86 home)
Maybe the Westboro Baptist Church...
And Windows 8 is Scientology.
Ok, what's the point of this stressed metaphor? It doesn't make it easier to remember anything, it doesn't help in understanding anything (largely because the various splits, etc. happened for entirely different reasons), it adds a completely unnecessary layer of indirection and, quite honestly, I find the comparison insulting.
So the point is? Aside from "because we can"? What am I missing that makes this blog-level nonsense frontpage-worthy?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Stop calling Scientology a church. They are not.
They are a tax evading criminal company selling a bogus cult for big money. Nothing else.
Whilst Torvalds is Calvin - the one who pulled the logic of the previous reformers together to create a complete system.
Religion is, and has always been, the main way humans self-organise and coordinate on a large scale. Modern civilisation has its advantages, but one drawback is that the rules are too numerous, can only really be understood by experts and is open to abuse by vested interests. Religion also has these shortcomings, but is generally much simpler in nature. We have a few thousand years of religious history to study how that part of human psychology works, and it is not surprising to see religious behaviour emerging naturally in secular aspects of life. (Fans following a football team are probably an excellent source of examples here.)
John_Chalisque
Didn't read the article, but the summary made me laugh!
That's pretty much true of every church. What's your point?
I still prefer my automotive analogy. Because manual transmission is a religion, too.
How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down On The Manual Farm?
Driving Instructor Philip Guo poses a similar question: 'How ya gonna get 'em down on a manual transmission after they've used a slush-box?' Convincing driving students from automatic culture to toss aside decades of advances in transmissions for a stick shift is a tough sell, Guo notes, and one that's made even more difficult when the instructors feel the advantages are self-evident. 'Just waving their arms and shouting "because, because RACECAR!!!" isn't going to cut it,' he advises. Guo's tips for success? 'You need to gently introduce students to why these tools will eventually make them more productive in the long run,' Guo suggests, 'even though there is a steep learning curve at the outset. Start slow, be supportive along the way, and don't disparage the automatic transmissions that they are accustomed to using, no matter how limited you think those tools are. Bridge the two cultures.'"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
> the most vicious grudges
Stross is probably hinting at this Emo Phillips joke:
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=61;t=000011
Minix is pretty close to Linux, so if Linux is the Protestant Church, Minix would be Lutheran? Or like BSD, it could have a bit of Eastern Orthodoxy in it?
For providing an analogoy that makes the history of ( some ) religions clear to them.
The "grudges" that most Christian denominations hold against each other, if one can even call them grudges by now, are by and large substantially less the fighting over operating systems by geeks. The Catholics officially regard baptized Protestants as Catholics who are out of communion with Rome. The term is "separated brethren," not "those damn heretics" now. Likewise, most Protestant denominations, even conservative ones, may harshly criticize the Catholic Church on issues of doctrine but regard observant Catholics as fellow Christians. The level of animosity is significantly less except on the outliers than Stross realizes, but then as far as I know he's an atheist and like most atheists he tends to think far too highly of his knowledge of religion especially Christianity.
It maps quite well to my own path: I started out with Solaris, but seeing how much such Unices dabbled in simony and venality, I "went protestant", and am a hardcore Linux-Calvinist now ( Slackware, Fuduntu, xfce et al. being the grounds of my daily toil.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
" He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty boy!"....
It's only a metaphor, but holds surprisingly well. Worryingly well. So well that we, if we claim to be modern enlightened people, should have some kind of response.
But what? Switching operating systems - like switching religions - involves a lot of work if you do it properly. Unlike religion it is possible to "worship" two or more OSes, but many people find that an inefficient way to work. So how can we avoid unwarranted faith in our way of doing things, fighting between neighbouring factions, and all the other destructive forces that religions suffer from?
The Linux kernel does a good job of holding all the myriad Linuxes together: all need the kernel to evolve and improve, but none can afford to implement those changes alone. Android and iOS have opened peoples eyes to other ways of interacting with computers and rendered the Windows-Mac conflict less important.
Technology evolves, preventing us from stagnating and developing unchangeable "holy" rules. It's a natural human tendency to break into tribal factions, but it seems that technological progress puts a damper on this, forcing us to widen our horizons and helping us to work together. Suddenly progress seems more important than ever.
Everyone knows BSD is equivalent to pagan devil worship, I mean just look at the logo.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
Actually, no. It isn't true. I'm not religious, but I'm not sophomorically opposed to religions. Try harder.
I'm sure a lot of people will take the android thing as a slight being associated with Mormon, so I'm not sure why he avoided the analogy that the whole thing was begging: Apple as Islam. Someone else said Microsoft as Scientology which was a good one as well.
The caliphate of Microsoft? There is no god but Windows and Bill Gates is his prophet?
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name.
Thy programs run, thy syscalls done,
In kernel as it is in user.
I'm sorry, but my kharma just ran over your dogma.
The article did mention that POSIX is the Nicene Creed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed If Windows is to be considered an "Abrahamic religion" under the metaphor, then it's no surprise that they follow the POSIX creed. It may come as some surprise to the adherents of Windows how much they share in common with the shunned UNIX brethren, though.
NO.
Only Scientology claimes their "biblical text" as proprietary confidential information.
I haven't met a real religion that prevents the spread of their doctrine.
Prove it.
--- Mercutio was right.
Nothing is more trite than comparing the evolution of X to the evolution of Y. But, please, why compare something useful (UNIX) to something useless (Religion)? Its journalistic masturbation. No one enjoys articles like this more than the person who wrote it in the first place.
What other people think of me is none of my business
Stop calling Scientology a church. They are not. They are a tax evading criminal company selling a bogus cult for big money. Nothing else.
The wealth and power of the Church used to rival kings, they built huge churches and cathedrals littered with decorations and ornamentations using exotic materials and fine craftsmanship while normal people lived in simple wooden huts. They used to take 10% of your income in tithe and paid none to the king, being in the Church's disfavor was second only to being an outlaw. Scientology is but a bleak shadow of what the Church used to be 500-1000 years ago. The only difference is that a small religion is a cult and a big cult is a religion.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Mrs Reiser?
I’ll start by saying that I like Mormonism (from a distance) because every single Mormon I’ve met was really really nice. Although, “saccharine” comes to mind for some of them. I’ve read things by former mormons who complained that mental illness like depression is verboten in Mormonism such that you basically have to pretend to be really really happy all the time, even if you need medical treatment. But that’s probably a biased source. I applied to work at Brigham Young (among countless other schools), and I had to swear to never have coffee, tea, or other “hot drinks.” I looked this up, and their rules make absolutely no sense.
Anyhow, the summary makes it look like this guy really really likes Mormonism. Is he a mormon? He loves Android and elaborates on how hard-working and sober they are.
What’s interesting about Mormonism is its relatively recent history and what we know about it. WIth other religions, the “facts” are lost to history such that it’s very difficult to prove those details to be false. Not so with Mormonism, which developed in recorded history. Basically, watch the relevant South Park episode. It tells you everything you need to know.
That being said, the “facts” of a religion aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. If someone claims the details of their scriptures to be historical fact, I roll my eyes. But if you take it as allegory, you can get good philosophy (and some bad philosophy) out. (Think of religious scriptures and traditions as a product of cultural natural selection, where sometimes some of the bad ideas have been filtered out over time.) For instance, ancient Hebrews had a disctinct pattern of taking someone else’s legends and modifying them heavily to add a moral message (whether or not we agree with the message). So, the Genesis flood story was a rewrite of the earlier story of Atra-Hasis. Other religions do this just as heavily. With Mormonism, I can let it go because it seems to be mostly beneficial, while Scientology (I hesitate to mention Scientology as a religion, because it’s really a Ponzi scheme, but they want to call it a religion) is evil and obviously a self-parody.
what would it stand for?
No, a virus would be hard-line fundamentalists, who the US elevated to power in the Middle East because they would originally be more amenable to doing our bidding in terms of who got the oil. The same virus can work in Christianity, and is pretty widespread. Or maybe the virus aggressively amoral capitalism, which has a really depressingly powerful synergy with fundamentalists. But perhaps I'm stretching the metaphor to far.
Islam, in this metaphor, might be described as another OS entirely that was implemented on top of Judaism; there's quite a few stories in the Bible that also show up in the Qur'an. Much of the Bible happens in the Middle East.
egypt urnash minimal art.
You forgot to mention Judaism 1.1, rebranded as Islam. Although mutually compatible with Judaism 1.0 and Christianity, its users vehemently deny this compatibility. It runs on almost any platform, but disables any other of Judaism found there ( it is pertinently *not* usable in a multi-boot environment ). All attempts to run Judaism 1.1 as a virtualized OS have also failed, until now.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Anyone up for making a Co-exist bumper sticker with the BSD, OS X, Windows and Linux logos? My art skills suck, but I can host the image for everyone!
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
How does this whole thing about LInux be a religion set with the "Cathedral and the Bazaar?" Now I'm confused. How can Linux be a religion when it was developed in a Bazaar?
I don't get it?
Have you compiled your kernel today??
If you recall the start of it...the whole point was to describe the relationship in terms that non-technical people were more likely to be familiar with. It isn't insightful about Unix unless you have no clue why multiple different OSs would be called Unix. It is a metaphor for the history, not the technology.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
halt
kill all
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You should've seen the trade-press about linux in the late 90's (not the hobbyist magazines, the entrenched big-iron publications).
There was a time when linux didn't run 95% of the world's super computers and 80% of the smartphones.
She has gained root.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm a programmer, a former Protestant, and now an Orthodox Clergyman. I found this article to be very entertaining. Now I know why I've always liked BSD and OS X.
I'm inspired to read one of Charlie Stross' books.
Proverbs 21:19
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"
Those would be the practitioners of the command line.
Have gnu, will travel.
It would be 1995 and I would be reading this article on Usenet.
Sorry, but that's just brilliant.
It truly is fortune-worthy.
This has helped me understand Christianity. (Unix history I have lived through)
Unlike religion it is possible to "worship" two or more OSes
Ah but at a fundamental level you can only have one endianess at a time and, unless you return to the source, it's hard to switch!
Stallman is the Anti-Pope. All hail GNU!
[iconv --from-code=utf-7]
VMS forever. Far more secure, far easier to use, far more features, and has an excellent built-in file system.
Multics may be dead but its genetic material lives on. Indeed some of the recessive genes, long dormant, are resurfacing. Android tries to implement capability based security, but as Android is typically layered on top of an operating system (usually Linux) that does not natively support capabilities from the hardware on up, Android can't really enforce capability based mandatory access controls. The L4 microkernels, OTOH, do... and they offer a fine base for virtualization frameworks in which more familiar OSes (and "bare metal" apps) can be hosted. So I chant horrific syllables by moonlight at forgotten altars of the Old Ones...
Sorry... somebody had to say it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hussites must be early forms of windows; after being rudely defenestrated you land in he crap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The main difference between cult and religion is longevity... a so-called "cult" belief that manages to remain established for more than about half a dozen generations or more may find itself being considered a religion by the end of that time.
I believe that secondary to longevity is that relative to the social environment that exists around it, a belief that would become religion does not tend to evolve or change very quickly. Not that I would suggest that religions are ever somehow magically immune to change that could easily infect any belief, but that the rate of its change is generally quite observably slower than the changes that otherwise happen in society itself. The reason for this is generally attributed to the high value and importance that people who believe that particular thing place on those beliefs, and so they tend to get passed along from generation to generation relatively unaltered.
So really, if you want to invent a new religion, you can try... but you won't be alive to see it actually become one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Charlie admits that Judaism is still alive and MULTICS is not. He should have gone with Zoroastrianism, even older. (Actually, writer Paul William Roberts found a tiny community of Zoroastrians in Iran a few decades back.) But then a few of us still remember MULTICS with some affection and it still affects our designs. The University of Calgary was sucked into the belief that MULTICS was a great future back in the 70s and ran one of the largest-ever installations of it, in user-count at least. (They were also taken in by ADA and ran some courses and assignments in it for a while.)
MULTICS was the only system I ever used that had the very cool and effective accounts/login design of two-parts to your login: your personal ID and your project ID. Your personal ID stayed permanently, but might lack all resources for years; your compiler course would come with one project-ID that would give you enough resources for that course; your database course would be a different project ID. Your access levels to various files, etc might change with which project ID you used, but your home directory was always yours because of your personal ID. It was cool. There were a few babies tossed with the bathwater when MULTICS was simplified down to Unix...
And why is it that when I was in DOS, then Windows, finally Unix/Solaris/Tru64/Linux, at the slightest mention of any difficulty, or sometimes without that, is it that Macaholic fanboys instantly jump in to Proclaim the TRVTH that Jobs had three tables handed down to him from Babbage Himself, and how all other o/ses are second class citizens at best, and beneath notice (like part-time undergrads or roaches) at worst?
And they didn't change their tone when Macs went from OS9 to OS/X/BSD Unix....
mark, wondering if there's a 12 step program for Macaholics we can send them to, since they
have money to burn on overpriced hardware
I work with Angstrom Linux. I guess that makes me a Quaker. Lots of little do-it-yourself communities.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
the topic it describes would be an acre of bread.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All this is power struggle between religions, but where is faith? What is a Unix user supposed to believe in?
Stop calling Scientology a church. They are not.
They are a tax evading criminal company selling a bogus cult for big money. Nothing else.
Rome called; they want their business model back.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Torvalds, and stuffed Penguin plushies!
If Unix were a religion then AT&T would surely be Satan! For rebelling and abandoning unix.... Honestly, somebody really had WAY too much time on their hands.. Somebody give Charlie Stross a job please ;-)
Windows ME?
Haven't thought about it like that before. I'd say it's Microsoft in general. The real Church is known for bullying their members. So is Microsoft. People I know that work with MS are like in a cult. They say it's used by real businesses. Never mind their phone, set top box, many retail stores and so on don't use Microsoft. In fact, it is quite a joke that anyone still uses it. It's quite a joke that anyone is still in the real church since the founder admitted it was a load of bull crap.
Does this means that Computer Scientists nail their Thesis on the Door? Maybe lisp is talking in tongues, or maybe that is perl with regular expressions. There are many other AWK-ward metaphors. And what about the serpent? Maybe it was python in the garden of Eden, and the devil, Microsoft and Bill Gates, stole the idea of the shell is called it DOS-shell, a stolen and corrupt version of the Bourne Shell.
Microsoft ain't hostile to GPL3 - Apple & most other companies are. Whenever any software of Microsoft ain't proprietary or shared source, Microsoft GPLs it so that few will go for it.
Then Windows would be Reform Judaism
I remember that post where someone categorized all the programming languages into the different religions. C was Judism, C++ was Christiantiy, Islam was Java, and he went on from there with a short explanation for how they were similar. Funny stuff.
But I like the flavor of it if not the content. Using a fire and brimestone style of preaching when handing out typical programming advice makes it interesting.
Verily I say unto thee, in the 1,388,683,865th second of our lord Unix, that when problems arise from the mired deep and dwell amongst the trembling users that ye shall get to yon source, blessed be it's revisions, and from the source ye shall see what troubles you.
Git ye to the source! Worship not at the closed cathedral of the proprietary, but walk amongst your fellows in the open Bazaar. Sleep not on the most holy of release days but rise early and release yon source often. And as the sun rises and falls ye shall release the next day and the day after. Often shall thee release least the curse of sleep lie your project low into the depths of hibernation and behind the veil of life.
One and only one task shall your program perform, and perform well, for the many headed feature hydra is a dark beast, ever creeping, ever crossing, never shall it's requirements sleep.
War not with the water buffalo for theirs is an enlightened path. Holy ones to be revered. Freely ranging over the plains, unyoked by the licenses of yore.
And war not amongst yourselves. The emancipated emacs and the virtuous vi can co-exist in peace and unity. Lay down your flames and live in harmony.
(Hmmmm... I should probably stay away from the term "Unity" now that it's that horrible thing in Ubuntu. Seriously, fuck those guys.)
If Unix is a religion then Microsoft must be a cult..... One standard party line. Devoted followers who shun and even castigate "non believers" An unproven and flawed philosophy that is adhered to as law. finally a lunatic leader who tends to see the world through "unique insight". Yep, Microsoft is a Cult! they even have the Purple coolaid (windows update) taken daily it steals your life and soul. If I had a penny for each minute of productivity lost collectively by windows Update, well I'd have a lot of pennies! HAH
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Religion describes the framework of how people and worship deity and interact with each other. Worship is any act that proclaims or recognises the worth of something. You can almost literally call it religion.
Minix & its 'reincarnation' server? Since Hinduism is one religion that has the concept of 'reincarnation'