Should the world only be using UNIX systems?

Lord no!

Developer friendly? Yes. User friendly? I can’t accept that, Mac OS X is obviously user friendly, but only because it hide just about every single aspect of UNIX. Seriously, what UNIX metaphor is still present in the Mac OS X GUI? I can’t think of a single one!

I’ve been using UNIX for a long time, since my Sun Ultra 1 and Silicon Graphics Indigo2 . I think UNIX is superb, a wonderful idea, and it’s resulted in lots of great Operating Systems.

I think the idea of only using UNIX though is the antithesis to innovative, the idea genuinely makes me shudder. The idea that after almost 50 years of UNIX, we’re supposed to set it stone, pretend we can’t do any better and encourage everyone to use it is more like religion than it is science. This is supposed to be Computer Science after all.

I’m not going to suggest any OS is better than UNIX, only that we need to consider them.

I think IBM i, on balance, if it was priced accordingly, is a better server OS than Solaris is, or GNU/Linux for that matter. I mention those two, because that’s where my experience is. I won’t go into the details, only to say that it’s easy to think UNIX is best if you’ve not used other systems. If you have, then it’s way less clear.

Plan 9 was created to replace UNIX, it never got traction, and while it’s still around, it’s not a serious player. Plan 9 has a lot of good ideas, primarily 9P, which is a networking protocol to present everything as a file system. If we’d listened to Plan 9 we might have 9P everywhere, and not 1,000,000 different, crap, REST APIs.

But really, it’s not about the alternatives, it’s about the very idea that that we should be encouraging the end of innovation. The idea that we just say “OK, what we’ve got is good enough, let’s leave it there”. By encouraging UNIX and only UNIX, we’re quickly into the word of dogma, not science.

I think we’d be far better served to get rid of the dogma, get rid of the Internet tropes that UNIX is somehow inherently better/more secure/more reliable and actually think about how we can better it.

UNIX is an amazing system, but it’s almost half a century old, the ideas within come from a different time. The ideas are in fact incredibly forward thinking, but we can’t, seriously, we can’t, just act like like this is as good as it gets.