Though the term “open source” and the Open Source Definition were not invented until 1998, peer-review-intensive development of freely shared source code was a key feature of the Unix culture from its beginnings.

For its first ten years AT&T's original Unix, and its primary variant Berkeley Unix, were normally distributed with source code. This enabled most of the other good things that follow here.

Unix is still the only operating system that can present a consistent, documented application programming interface (API) across a heterogeneous mix of computers, vendors, and special-purpose hardware. It is the only operating system that can scale from embedded chips and handhelds, up through desktop machines, through servers, and all the way to special-purpose number-crunching behemoths and database back ends.

The Unix API is the closest thing to a hardware-independent standard for writing truly portable software that exists. It is no accident that what the IEEE originally called the Portable Operating System Standard quickly got a suffix added to its acronym and became POSIX. A Unix-equivalent API was the only credible model for such a standard.

Binary-only applications for other operating systems die with their birth environments, but Unix sources are forever. Forever, at least, given a Unix technical culture that polishes and maintains them across decades.

The Defense Department's contract for the first production TCP/IP stack went to a Unix development group because the Unix in question was largely open source. Besides TCP/IP, Unix has become the one indispensable core technology of the Internet Service Provider industry. Ever since the demise of the TOPS family of operating systems in the mid-1980s, most Internet server machines (and effectively all above the PC level) have relied on Unix.

Not even Microsoft's awesome marketing clout has been able to dent Unix's lock on the Internet. While the TCP/IP standards (on which the Internet is based) evolved under TOPS-10 and are theoretically separable from Unix, attempts to make them work on other operating systems have been bedeviled by incompatibilities, instabilities, and bugs. The theory and specifications are available to anyone, but the engineering tradition to make them into a solid and working reality exists only in the Unix world.^[7]

The Internet technical culture and the Unix culture began to merge in the early 1980s, and are now inseparably symbiotic. The design of the World Wide Web, the modern face of the Internet, owes as much to Unix as it does to the ancestral ARPANET. In particular, the concept of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so central to the Web is a generalization of the Unix idea of one uniform file namespace everywhere. To function effectively as an Internet expert, an understanding of Unix and its culture are indispensable.

The community that originally formed around the early Unix source distributions never went away — after the great Internet explosion of the early 1990s, it recruited an entire new generation of eager hackers on home machines.

Today, that community is a powerful support group for all kinds of software development. High-quality open-source development tools abound in the Unix world (we'll examine many in this book). Open-source Unix applications are usually equal to, and are often superior to, their proprietary equivalents [Fuzz]. Entire Unix operating systems, with complete toolkits and basic applications suites, are available for free over the Internet. Why code from scratch when you can adapt, reuse, recycle, and save yourself 90% of the work?

This tradition of code-sharing depends heavily on hard-won expertise about how to make programs cooperative and reusable. And not by abstract theory, but through a lot of engineering practice — unobvious design rules that allow programs to function not just as isolated one-shot solutions but as synergistic parts of a toolkit. A major purpose of this book is to elucidate those rules.

Today, a burgeoning open-source movement is bringing new vitality, new technical approaches, and an entire generation of bright young programmers into the Unix tradition. Open-source projects including the Linux operating system and symbionts such as Apache and Mozilla have brought the Unix tradition an unprecedented level of mainstream visibility and success. The open-source movement seems on the verge of winning its bid to define the computing infrastructure of tomorrow — and the core of that infrastructure will be Unix machines running on the Internet.

Many operating systems touted as more ‘modern’ or ‘user friendly’ than Unix achieve their surface glossiness by locking users and developers into one interface policy, and offer an application-programming interface that for all its elaborateness is rather narrow and rigid. On such systems, tasks the designers have anticipated are very easy — but tasks they have not anticipated are often impossible or at best extremely painful.

Unix, on the other hand, has flexibility in depth. The many ways Unix provides to glue together programs mean that components of its basic toolkit can be combined to produce useful effects that the designers of the individual toolkit parts never anticipated.

Unix's support of multiple styles of program interface (often seen as a weakness because it increases the perceived complexity of the system to end users) also contributes to flexibility; no program that wants to be a simple piece of data plumbing is forced to carry the complexity overhead of an elaborate GUI.

Unix tradition lays heavy emphasis on keeping programming interfaces relatively small, clean, and orthogonal — another trait that produces flexibility in depth. Throughout a Unix system, easy things are easy and hard things are at least possible.

People who pontificate about Unix's technical superiority often don't mention what may ultimately be its most important strength, the one that underlies all its successes. Unix is fun to hack.

Unix boosters seem almost ashamed to acknowledge this sometimes, as though admitting they're having fun might damage their legitimacy somehow. But it's true; Unix is fun to play with and develop for, and always has been.

There are not many operating systems that anyone has ever described as ‘fun’. Indeed, the friction and labor of development under most other environments has been aptly compared to kicking a dead whale down the beach.^[8] The kindest adjectives one normally hears are on the order of “tolerable” or “not too painful”. In the Unix world, by contrast, the operating system rewards effort rather than frustrating it. People programming under Unix usually come to see it not as an adversary to be clubbed into doing one's bidding by main effort but rather as an actual positive help.

This has real economic significance. The fun factor started a virtuous circle early in Unix's history. People liked Unix, so they built more programs for it that made it nicer to use. Today people build entire, production-quality open-source Unix systems as a hobby. To understand how remarkable this is, ask yourself when you last heard of anybody cloning OS/360 or VAX VMS or Microsoft Windows for fun.

The ‘fun’ factor is not trivial from a design point of view, either. The kind of people who become programmers and developers have ‘fun’ when the effort they have to put out to do a task challenges them, but is just within their capabilities. ‘Fun’ is therefore a sign of peak efficiency. Painful development environments waste labor and creativity; they extract huge hidden costs in time, money, and opportunity.

If Unix were a failure in every other way, the Unix engineering culture would be worth studying for the ways it keeps the fun in development — because that fun is a sign that it makes developers efficient, effective, and productive.

Unix programmers have accumulated decades of experience while pioneering operating-system features we now take for granted. Even non-Unix programmers can benefit from studying that Unix experience. Because Unix makes it relatively easy to apply good design principles and development methods, it is an excellent place to learn them.

Other operating systems generally make good practice rather more difficult, but even so some of the Unix culture's lessons can transfer. Much Unix code (including all its filters, its major scripting languages, and many of its code generators) will port directly to any operating system supporting ANSI C (for the excellent reason that C itself was a Unix invention and the ANSI C library embodies a substantial chunk of Unix's services!).