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Today, Linux is Unix. And Linux is a traditional, old-fashioned, native-binary, honking great monolithic lump of code in a primitive, unsafe, 1970s language.
The sad truth is this:
Unix is not going to evolve any more. It hasn't evolved much in 30 years. It's just being refined: the bugs are gradually getting caught, but no big changes have happened since the 1980s.
Dr Andy Tanenbaum was right in 1991. Linux is obsolete.
Many old projects had a version numbering scheme like, e.g., SunOS:
Release 1.0, r2, r3, r4...
Then a big rewrite: Version 2! Solaris! (AKA SunOS 5)
Then Solaris 2, 3, 4, 5... now we're on 11 and counting.
Windows reset after v3, with NT. Java did the reverse after 1.4: Java 1.5 was "Java 5". Looks more mature, right? Right?
Well, Unix dates from between 1970 and the rewrite in C in 1972. Motto: "Everything's a file."
Unix 2.0 happened way back in the 1980s and was released in 1991: Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
It was Unix, but with even more things turned into files. Integrated networking, distributed processes and more.
The world ignored it.
Plan 9 2.0 was Inferno: it went truly platform-neutral. C was replaced by Limbo, type-safe, compiling code down to binaries that ran on Dis, a universal VM. Sort of like Java, but better and reaching right down into the kernel.
The world ignored that, too.
Then came the idea of microkernels. They've been tried lots of times, but people seized on the idea of early versions that had problems -- Mach 1 and Mach 2 -- and failed projects such as the GNU HURD.
They ignore successful versions:
* Mach 3 as used in Mac OS X and iOS
* DEC OSF/1, later called DEC Tru64 Unix, also based on Mach
* QNX, a proprietary true-microkernel OS used widely around the world since the 1980s, now in Blackberry 10 but also in hundreds of millions of embedded devices.
All are proper solid commercial successes.
Now, there's Minix 3, a FOSS microkernel with the NetBSD userland on top.
But Linux is too established.
Yes, NextBSD is a very interesting project. But basically, it's just fitting Apple userland services onto FreeBSD.
So, yes, interesting, but FreeBSD is a sideline. Linux is the real focus of attention. FreeBSD jails are over a decade old, but look at the fuss the world is making about Docker.
There is now too much legacy around Unix -- and especially Linux -- for any other Unix to get much traction.
We've had Unix 2.0, then Unix 2.1, then a different, less radical, more conservative kind of Unix 2.0 in the form of microkernels. Simpler, cleaner, more modular, more reliable.
And everyone ignored it.
So we're stuck with the old one, and it won't go away until something totally different comes along to replace it altogether.
The sad truth is this:
Unix is not going to evolve any more. It hasn't evolved much in 30 years. It's just being refined: the bugs are gradually getting caught, but no big changes have happened since the 1980s.
Dr Andy Tanenbaum was right in 1991. Linux is obsolete.
Many old projects had a version numbering scheme like, e.g., SunOS:
Release 1.0, r2, r3, r4...
Then a big rewrite: Version 2! Solaris! (AKA SunOS 5)
Then Solaris 2, 3, 4, 5... now we're on 11 and counting.
Windows reset after v3, with NT. Java did the reverse after 1.4: Java 1.5 was "Java 5". Looks more mature, right? Right?
Well, Unix dates from between 1970 and the rewrite in C in 1972. Motto: "Everything's a file."
Unix 2.0 happened way back in the 1980s and was released in 1991: Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
It was Unix, but with even more things turned into files. Integrated networking, distributed processes and more.
The world ignored it.
Plan 9 2.0 was Inferno: it went truly platform-neutral. C was replaced by Limbo, type-safe, compiling code down to binaries that ran on Dis, a universal VM. Sort of like Java, but better and reaching right down into the kernel.
The world ignored that, too.
Then came the idea of microkernels. They've been tried lots of times, but people seized on the idea of early versions that had problems -- Mach 1 and Mach 2 -- and failed projects such as the GNU HURD.
They ignore successful versions:
* Mach 3 as used in Mac OS X and iOS
* DEC OSF/1, later called DEC Tru64 Unix, also based on Mach
* QNX, a proprietary true-microkernel OS used widely around the world since the 1980s, now in Blackberry 10 but also in hundreds of millions of embedded devices.
All are proper solid commercial successes.
Now, there's Minix 3, a FOSS microkernel with the NetBSD userland on top.
But Linux is too established.
Yes, NextBSD is a very interesting project. But basically, it's just fitting Apple userland services onto FreeBSD.
So, yes, interesting, but FreeBSD is a sideline. Linux is the real focus of attention. FreeBSD jails are over a decade old, but look at the fuss the world is making about Docker.
There is now too much legacy around Unix -- and especially Linux -- for any other Unix to get much traction.
We've had Unix 2.0, then Unix 2.1, then a different, less radical, more conservative kind of Unix 2.0 in the form of microkernels. Simpler, cleaner, more modular, more reliable.
And everyone ignored it.
So we're stuck with the old one, and it won't go away until something totally different comes along to replace it altogether.
