On Unix and other Computing Cultures

from Weber's Success of Open Source

from Salus' Quarter Century of Unix

notes on Kelty's Two Bits

Thomas Scoville: The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature http://theody.net/elements.html

The Art of Unix Programming:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook ed. by Simpson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann San Mateo: IDG, 1994

some commentary:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html - 2003

Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.

The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

http://www.hypertextnavigation.com/unixgui.htm

Unix culture has an established loathing of casual users, business users, and the graphical desktop.

http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html - 1998

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need.

http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html

The whole Unix culture was based upon sending C source code from person to person, adding features and fixing bugs as time went on.

http://www.theopavlidis.com/technology/unixOpinion.htm

Note that there was no technical reason why Unix could not have come up with a good graphical user interface system

http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~acc/docs/unix.html - Hauben

The_Daemon_the_GNU_and_the_Penguin.htm

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