Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
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By Charlie Stross
Yesterday, after writing my way past the notional halfway point (both of the
current novel manuscript, and of the trilogy it's the middle volume of), I went
and over-indulged in food and drink with friends.
Over the beer, the conversation turned—for no sane reason—to computer operating
systems. There being some non-technical folks at the table, I then had to cough
up a metaphor to contextualize the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX,
thuswise:
There is one true religion in operating systems, and it is UNIX. Or maybe it's
not the one true faith: there's an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far
fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down
rules-deficient heresy in the early days of the epoch. Either way, if MULTICS is
Judaism (and the metaphor is questionable at this point, for unlike MULTICS,
Judaism is still alive), then UNIX is Christianity.
In the early days, the UNIX faith spread underground among nests of true
believers; but they evangelized their friends and neighbours and gradually it
began to spread in strange communities. And with the spread came the great
split. 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. And then lo, there were many schisms.
In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful formed learned congregations
who at major conferences defined a common interoperating subset of the one true
religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX is probably POSIX, but
let us not forget the congregation of the X/Open Portability Group and others.
The bishops and cardinals of UNIX were fierce in the defense of their own
particular schismatic sect, and formed alliances to develop credos that excluded
their rivals while cunningly embracing their temporary peers: thus was the holy
war prosecuted.
Today, the biggest church within the Orthodox community—possibly 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 in the late 1980s, the Catholic Church succumbed to the sins of venality and
simony, demanding too much money from the faithful. And so, in 1991 or
thereabouts, Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the
cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. The Reformation took the shape of
a new, freely copyable kernel that all the faithful could read with their own
eyes. This Protestant heresy spread like wildfire among the people but was
resisted with acts of vicious repression by the high priesthood of Corporate IT
(arguably in connivance with the infidel invaders from the Caliphate of
Microsoft). 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.
Reformation came at a price: another wave of religious conclaves that tried to
hammer out a common ground between the various reformed churches. (See also the
Linux Standard Base, and also the internecine war between packaging systems such
as RPM or DPKG—the correct way to print and bind a Bible. This was, arguably,
won by DPKG, which should therefore be considered the King James Version of the
Linux holy scripture.)
More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux, grafting an entirely new
-u-s-e-r i-n-t-e-r-f-a-c-e- revelation atop the same kernel: Android, which true
adherents of the UNIX faith (even die-hard reformed Church Linuxers) mostly deny
the UNIX-dom of. 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.
Note that, as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones
who hold the most vicious grudges against one another.
