Counter-Enlightenment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Enlightenment 

People beginning in the mid 20th century have used the term Counter-Enlightenment to describe strains of thought that arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in opposition to the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Although the first known use of the term in English occurred in 1949 and there were several earlier uses of it, including one by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the term "Counter-Enlightenment" is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who is often credited for re-inventing it. Discussion of this concept began with Isaiah Berlin's 1973 Essay, The Counter-Enlightenment. He published widely about the Enlightenment and its challengers and did much to popularise the concept of a Counter-Enlightenment movement that he characterized as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist, and organic, which he associated most closely with German Romanticism.

Development and significant people

Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre was one of the more prominent altar-and-throne counter-revolutionaries who vehemently opposed Enlightenment ideas.

Early stages

Despite criticism of the Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth-century thought, the term 'Counter-Enlightenment' was underdeveloped. It was first mentioned briefly in English in William Barrett's 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" in Partisan Review. He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism, Irrational Man; however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism was very limited. In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.

Lewis White Beck used this term in his Early German Philosophy (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction to Frederick II's secular authoritarian state. On the other hand, Johann Georg Hamann and his fellow philosophers believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century.

Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin established this term's place in the history of ideas. He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and empiricism, which are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, and later reprinted in a collection of his works, Against the Current, in 1981. The term has been more widely used since.

Isaiah Berlin traces the Counter-Enlightenment back to J. G. Hamann (shown).

Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not start until the Germans 'rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment.' This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the francophile Frederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism. The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment was pluralism. The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom were monists, whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have been terreur and totalitarianism.

Darrin McMahon

In his book Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street,' thereby marking a major advance on Berlin's intellectual and Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten 'Grub Street' literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the philosophes. He delves into the obscure world of the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the encyclopédistes and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.

Graeme Garrard

Graeme Garrard traces the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment to Rousseau.

Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard claims that historian William R. Everdell was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion. In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents. Graeme Garrard follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as a philosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book Counter-Enlightenments (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single 'movement' called 'The Counter-Enlightenment'. Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century to 20th-century Enlightenment among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.

James Schmidt

The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in the following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of 'Enlightenment' and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of 'Enlightenment' has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an 'Age of Reason', leading Schmidt to speculate on whether the Enlightenment might not actually be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term 'Enlightenment' was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.

The French Revolution

Political thinker Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

By the mid-1790s, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment. Many leaders of the French Revolution and their supporters made Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as Marquis de Condorcet's ideas of reason, progress, anti-clericalism, and emancipation central themes to their movement. It led to an unavoidable backlash to the Enlightenment as there were people opposed to the revolution. Many counter-revolutionary writers, such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel, asserted an intrinsic link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution. They blamed the Enlightenment for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the ancien regime. As the Revolution became increasingly bloody, the idea of 'Enlightenment' was discredited, too. Hence, the French Revolution and its aftermath have contributed to the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought.

Edmund Burke was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate the philosophes to the instability in France in the 1790s. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) refers the Enlightenment as the principal cause of the French revolution. In Burke's opinion, the philosophes provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based.

Augustin Barruel's Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before the revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti-philosophes literary journal, L'Année Littéraire. Barruel argues in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons.

In Considerations on France (1797), Joseph de Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions."

Romanticism

In the 1770s, the 'Sturm und Drang' movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of the Aufklärung and the term 'Romanticism' was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand, Federich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited the Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the philosophes in France and the Aufklärer in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since the philosophes and Aufklarer were generally deists, opposed to revealed religion. Some historians, such as Hamann, nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since the term itself did not exist at the time and most of their contemporaries ignored it.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, c. 1797, 21.5 cm × 15 cm. One of the most famous prints of the Caprichos.

The historian Jacques Barzun argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya's Sleep of Reason, in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos, a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx. Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in Romanticism and Enlightenment, questioning the stark opposition between these two periods.

By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called 'middle period' (late-1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it.

Totalitarianism

In the intellectual discourse of the mid-20th century, two concepts emerged simultaneously in the West: enlightenment and totalitarianism. After World War II, the former re-emerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas. The Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the 18th-century trust in reason for 20th-century totalitarianism also resurged along with it. The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomized by the cunning 'bourgeois' hero Odysseus) to 20th-century fascism. They mentioned little about Soviet communism, only referring to it as a regressive totalitarianism that "clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy".

The authors take 'enlightenment' as their target including its 18th-century form – which we now call 'The Enlightenment'. They claim it is epitomized by the Marquis de Sade. However, there were philosophers rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that Sade's moral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects Enlightenment thought.

Many postmodern writers and feminists (e.g. Jane Flax) have made similar arguments. They regard the Enlightenment conception of reason as totalitarian, and as not having been enlightened enough since. For Adorno and Horkheimer, though it banishes myth it falls back into a further myth, that of individualism and formal (or mythic) equality under instrumental reason.

Michel Foucault, for example, argued that attitudes towards the "insane" during the late-18th and early 19th centuries show that supposedly enlightened notions of humane treatment were not universally adhered to, but instead, the Age of Reason had to construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing stand. Berlin himself, although no postmodernist, argues that the Enlightenment's legacy in the 20th century has been monism (which he claims favours political authoritarianism), whereas the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment has been pluralism (associates with liberalism). These are two of the 'strange reversals' of modern intellectual history.

Comparison of open-source and closed-source software

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_and_closed-source_software 

Free/open-source software – the source availability model used by free and open-source software (FOSS) – and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.

Background

Under the closed-source model source code is not released to the public. Closed-source software is maintained by a team who produces their product in a compiled-executable state, which is what the market is allowed access to. Microsoft, the owner and developer of Windows and Microsoft Office, along with other major software companies, have long been proponents of this business model, although in August 2010, Microsoft interoperability general manager Jean Paoli said Microsoft "loves open source" and its anti-open-source position was a mistake.

The FOSS model allows for able users to view and modify a product's source code, but most of such code is not in the public domain. Common advantages cited by proponents for having such a structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality.

A non-free license is used to limit what free software movement advocates consider to be the essential freedoms. A license, whether providing open-source code or not, that does not stipulate the "four software freedoms", are not considered "free" by the free software movement. A closed source license is one that limits only the availability of the source code. By contrast a copyleft license claims to protect the "four software freedoms" by explicitly granting them and then explicitly prohibiting anyone to redistribute the package or reuse the code in it to make derivative works without including the same licensing clauses. Some licenses grant the four software freedoms but allow redistributors to remove them if they wish. Such licenses are sometimes called permissive software licenses. An example of such a license is the FreeBSD License which allows derivative software to be distributed as non-free or closed source, as long as they give credit to the original designers.

A misconception that is often made by both proponents and detractors of FOSS is that it cannot be capitalized. FOSS can and has been commercialized by companies such as Red Hat, Canonical, Mozilla, Google, IBM, Novell, Sun/Oracle, VMware and others.

Commercialization

Closed-source software

The primary business model for closed-source software involves the use of constraints on what can be done with the software and the restriction of access to the original source code. This can result in a form of imposed artificial scarcity on a product that is otherwise very easy to copy and redistribute. The end result is that an end-user is not actually purchasing software, but purchasing the right to use the software. To this end, the source code to closed-source software is considered a trade secret by its manufacturers.

FOSS

FOSS methods, on the other hand, typically do not limit the use of software in this fashion. Instead, the revenue model is based mainly on support services. Red Hat Inc. and Canonical Ltd. are such companies that give its software away freely, but charge for support services. The source code of the software is usually given away, and pre-compiled binary software frequently accompanies it for convenience. As a result, the source code can be freely modified. However, there can be some license-based restrictions on re-distributing the software. Generally, software can be modified and re-distributed for free, as long as credit is given to the original manufacturer of the software. In addition, FOSS can generally be sold commercially, as long as the source-code is provided. There are a wide variety of free software licenses that define how a program can be used, modified, and sold commercially. FOSS may also be funded through donations.

A software philosophy that combines aspects of FOSS and proprietary software is open core software, or commercial open source software. Despite having received criticism from some proponents of FOSS, it has exhibited marginal success. Examples of open core software include MySQL and VirtualBox. The MINIX operating system used to follow this business model, but came under the full terms of the BSD license after the year 2000.

Handling competition

This model has proved somewhat successful, as witnessed in the Linux community. There are numerous Linux distributions available, but a great many of them are simply modified versions of some previous version. For example, Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux, and PCLinuxOS are all derivatives of an earlier product, Red Hat Linux. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is itself a derivative of Fedora Linux. This is an example of one vendor creating a product, allowing a third-party to modify the software, and then creating a tertiary product based on the modified version. All of the products listed above are currently produced by software service companies.

Operating systems built on the Linux kernel are available for a wider range of processor architectures than Microsoft Windows, including PowerPC and SPARC. None of these can match the sheer popularity of the x86 architecture, nevertheless they do have significant numbers of users; Windows remains unavailable for these alternative architectures, although there have been such ports of it in the past.

The most obvious complaint against FOSS revolves around the fact that making money through some traditional methods, such as the sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payments, is much more difficult and sometimes impractical with FOSS. Moreover, FOSS has been considered damaging to the commercial software market, evidenced in documents released as part of the Microsoft Halloween documents leak.

The cost of making a copy of a software program is essentially zero, so per-use fees are perhaps unreasonable for open-source software. At one time, open-source software development was almost entirely volunteer-driven, and although this is true for many small projects, many alternative funding streams have been identified and employed for FOSS:

• Give away the program and charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions).
• "Commoditize complements": make a product cheaper or free so that people are more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell.
• Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server).
• Donations
• Crowd funding

Increasingly, FOSS is developed by commercial organizations. In 2004, Andrew Morton noted that 37,000 of the 38,000 recent patches in the Linux kernel were created by developers directly paid to develop the Linux kernel. Many projects, such as the X Window System and Apache, have had commercial development as a primary source of improvements since their inception. This trend has accelerated over time.

There are some who counter that the commercialization of FOSS is a poorly devised business model because commercial FOSS companies answer to parties with opposite agendas. On one hand commercial FOSS companies answer to volunteers developers, who are difficult to keep on a schedule, and on the other hand they answer to shareholders, who are expecting a return on their investment. Often FOSS development is not on a schedule and therefore it may have an adverse effect on a commercial FOSS company releasing software on time.

Innovation

Gary Hamel counters this claim by saying that quantifying who or what is innovative is impossible.

The implementation of compatible FOSS replacements for proprietary software is encouraged by the Free Software Foundation to make it possible for their users to use FOSS instead of proprietary software, for example they have listed GNU Octave, an API-compatible replacement for MATLAB, as one of their high priority projects. In the past this list contained free binary compatible Java and CLI implementations, like GNU Classpath and DotGNU. Thus even "derivative" developments are important in the opinion of many people from FOSS. However, there is no quantitative analysis, if FOSS is less innovative than proprietary software, since there are derivative/re-implementing proprietary developments, too.

Some of the largest well-known FOSS projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache) developed a long time ago independently of the free software movement, or by companies like Netscape (which open-sourced its code with the hope that they could compete better), or by companies like MySQL which use FOSS to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product. However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites (in the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original code.

Innovations have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:

• Perl, the pioneering open-source scripting language, made popular many features, like regular expressions and associative arrays, that were unusual at the time. The newer Python language continues this innovation, with features like functional constructs and class-dictionary unification.
• dcraw is an open-source tool for decoding RAW-format images from a variety of digital cameras, which can produce better images than the closed-source tools provided by the camera vendors themselves.
• A number of laptop models are available with a particular emphasis on multimedia capabilities. While these invariably come preinstalled with a copy of Microsoft Windows, some of them also offer an alternative "fast-boot" mode (such as Phoenix HyperSpace) based on Linux. This gets around the long time it can take to boot up Windows.
• VLC media player, Songbird, and Amarok are FOSS music players that integrate internet-based data sources to an unprecedented degree, taking song information from MusicBrainz, related track information from last.fm, album cover art from amazon.com and displaying an artist's Wikipedia page within the player.
• While admittedly inspired by Mac OS X's Quartz graphics layer, Compiz Fusion has pioneered the concept of "plug in" window decorators and animation effects. Users can develop their own creative and unique effects.
• Open-source telecommunication products, such as the Asterisk PBX, have revolutionized the ICT industry.
• There are substantial efforts towards the implementation of a semantic desktop in FOSS communities.
• Today's desktop environments are innovating regarding their unique idea of a Social Desktop.
• Many academic research projects release their results as FOSS.

Code quality

An analysis of the code of the FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating system kernels looked for differences between code developed using open-source properties (the first two kernels) and proprietary code (the other two kernels). The study collected metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using open- and closed-source development processes score comparably. The study mentioned above is refuted by a study conducted by Coverity, Inc finding open source code to be of better quality.

Security

A study done on seventeen open-source and closed-source software showed that the number of vulnerabilities existing in a piece of software is not affected by the source availability model that it uses. The study used a very simple metrics of comparing the number of vulnerabilities between the open-source and closed-source software. Another study was also done by a group of professors in Northern Kentucky University on fourteen open-source web applications written in PHP. The study measured the vulnerability density in the web applications and shown that some of them had increased vulnerability density, but some of them also had decreased vulnerability density.

Business models

In its 2008 Annual Report, Microsoft stated that FOSS business models challenge its license-based software model and that the firms who use these business models do not bear the cost for their software development. The company also stated in the report:

Some of these [open source software] firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline. Open source software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of our products, in some cases on the basis of technical specifications for Microsoft technologies that we make available. In response to competition, we are developing versions of our products with basic functionality that are sold at lower prices than the standard versions.

There are numerous business models for open source companies which can be found in the literature.

 

Unix

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix 

 

Unix

Evolution of Unix and Unix-like systems
Developer	Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs
Written in	C and assembly language
OS family	Unix
Source model	Historically proprietary software, while some Unix projects (including BSD family and illumos) are open-source
Initial release	Development started in 1969 First manual published internally in November 1971 Announced outside Bell Labs in October 1973
Available in	English
Kernel type	Varies; monolithic, microkernel, hybrid
Influenced by	Multics
Default user interface	Command-line interface and Graphical (Wayland and X Window System; Android SurfaceFlinger; macOS Quartz)
License	Varies; some versions are proprietary, others are free/open-source software
Official website	opengroup.org/unix

Unix (/ˈjuːnɪks/; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX). In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell, which then sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1995. The UNIX trademark passed to The Open Group, an industry consortium founded in 1996, which allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). However, Novell continues to own the Unix copyrights, which the SCO Group, Inc. v. Novell, Inc. court case (2010) confirmed.

Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy". According to this philosophy, the operating system should provide a set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function. A unified filesystem (the Unix filesystem) and an inter-process communication mechanism known as "pipes" serve as the main means of communication, and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows.

Unix distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language, which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms.

Overview

Version 7 Unix, the Research Unix ancestor of all modern Unix systems

Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers. The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, and as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues.

At first, Unix was not designed to be portable or for multi-tasking. Later, Unix gradually gained portability, multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the "Unix philosophy". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in The Unix Programming Environment as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves".

By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as a potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes. The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers.

Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to a wider variety of machine families than any other operating system.

The Unix operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the distinction of kernel space from user space, the latter being a priority realm where most application programs operate.

History

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie working together at a PDP-11

The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing Multics, a time-sharing operating system for the GE-645 mainframe computer. Multics featured several innovations, but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, who decided to reimplement their experiences in a new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name.

The new operating system was a single-tasking system. In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service as a pun on Multics, which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services. Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix. Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Peter G. Neumann also credit Kernighan.

The operating system was originally written in assembly language, but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C. Version 4 Unix, however, still had many PDP-11 dependent codes, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform was made five years later (1978) for the Interdata 8/32.

In 1974, Ken Robinson of the Department of Computer Science at University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia requested a copy of Unix for their PDP-11/40 minicomputer from Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. This 1975 installation made UNSW the first university outside the United States to run Unix.

Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Department of Computer Science (UIUC). UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the Unix kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (BSD and System V) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar but often slightly mutually-incompatible systems including DYNIX, HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and Xenix. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 (SVR4), which was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors.

In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin, also a Unix system, which became the core of the Mac OS X operating system, later renamed macOS.

Unix operating systems are widely used in modern servers, workstations, and mobile devices.

Standards

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE), part of the COSE initiative

In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing the first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group. Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group, to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become the Open Group Base Specification.

In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among different Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide a reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems; it has mainly been used in Linux.

Components

The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had such a broad influence.

The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on a single nine-track magnetic tape. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes.

The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation is considered by many to have the canonical early structure:

• Kernel – source code in /usr/sys, composed of several sub-components:
  • conf – configuration and machine-dependent parts, including boot code
  • dev – device drivers for control of hardware (and some pseudo-hardware)
  • sys – operating system "kernel", handling memory management, process scheduling, system calls, etc.
  • h – header files, defining key structures within the system and important system-specific invariables
• Development environment – early versions of Unix contained a development environment sufficient to recreate the entire system from source code:
  • cc – C language compiler (first appeared in V3 Unix)
  • as – machine-language assembler for the machine
  • ld – linker, for combining object files
  • lib – object-code libraries (installed in /lib or /usr/lib). libc, the system library with C run-time support, was the primary library, but there have always been additional libraries for things such as mathematical functions (libm) or database access. V7 Unix introduced the first version of the modern "Standard I/O" library stdio as part of the system library. Later implementations increased the number of libraries significantly.
  • make – build manager (introduced in PWB/UNIX), for effectively automating the build process
  • include – header files for software development, defining standard interfaces and system invariants
  • Other languages – V7 Unix contained a Fortran-77 compiler, a programmable arbitrary-precision calculator (bc, dc), and the awk scripting language; later versions and implementations contain many other language compilers and toolsets. Early BSD releases included Pascal tools, and many modern Unix systems also include the GNU Compiler Collection as well as or instead of a proprietary compiler system.
  • Other tools – including an object-code archive manager (ar), symbol-table lister (nm), compiler-development tools (e.g. lex & yacc), and debugging tools.
• Commands – Unix makes little distinction between commands (user-level programs) for system operation and maintenance (e.g. cron), commands of general utility (e.g. grep), and more general-purpose applications such as the text formatting and typesetting package. Nonetheless, some major categories are:
  • sh – the "shell" programmable command-line interpreter, the primary user interface on Unix before window systems appeared, and even afterward (within a "command window").
  • Utilities – the core toolkit of the Unix command set, including cp, ls, grep, find and many others. Subcategories include:
    • System utilities – administrative tools such as mkfs, fsck, and many others.
    • User utilities – environment management tools such as passwd, kill, and others.
  • Document formatting – Unix systems were used from the outset for document preparation and typesetting systems, and included many related programs such as nroff, troff, tbl, eqn, refer, and pic. Some modern Unix systems also include packages such as TeX and Ghostscript.
  • Graphics – the plot subsystem provided facilities for producing simple vector plots in a device-independent format, with device-specific interpreters to display such files. Modern Unix systems also generally include X11 as a standard windowing system and GUI, and many support OpenGL.
  • Communications – early Unix systems contained no inter-system communication, but did include the inter-user communication programs mail and write. V7 introduced the early inter-system communication system UUCP, and systems beginning with BSD release 4.1c included TCP/IP utilities.
• Documentation – Unix was the first operating system to include all of its documentation online in machine-readable form. The documentation included:
  • man – manual pages for each command, library component, system call, header file, etc.
  • doc – longer documents detailing major subsystems, such as the C language and troff

Impact

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, principal developers of Research Unix

 

Photo from USENIX 1984, including Dennis Ritchie (center)

 

Plan 9 from Bell Labs extends Unix design principles and was developed as a successor to Unix.

The Unix system had a significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing the software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language, but was soon rewritten in C, a high-level programming language. Although this followed the lead of Multics and Burroughs, it was Unix that popularized the idea.

Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers, terminals, or disk drives), providing a uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms.

Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of the era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into VMS directories, CP/M's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems.

Making the command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting (shell scripts – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing the shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes (pipelines) made a powerful programming paradigm (coroutines) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell.

A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline-delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in the original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems. The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could be easily combined to perform more complicated ad hoc tasks. The focus on text and bytes made the system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages (PostScript, ODF), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols, e.g., FTP, SMTP, HTTP, SOAP, and SIP.

Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became the basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming.

Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established a set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy.

The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide real-time connectivity, and which formed the basis for implementations on many other platforms.

The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the launch of the free software movement in 1983.

Free Unix and Unix-like variants

Console screenshots of Debian (top, a popular Linux distribution) and FreeBSD (bottom, a popular Unix-like operating system)

In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system; "free" in the sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd, had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the kernel Linux as free software under the GNU General Public License. In addition to their use in the GNU operating system, many GNU packages – such as the GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain), the GNU C library and the GNU core utilities – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well.

Linux distributions, consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva Linux, Slackware Linux, Arch Linux and Gentoo.

A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD, was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. (USL v. BSDi) by Unix System Laboratories, it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD.

Linux and BSD are increasingly filling the market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, as well as expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop and mobile and embedded devices. Because of the modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common; consequently, most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, and some systems also include GNU utilities in their distributions.

In a 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design, and are derivatives of Unix:

I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be the among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers.

In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago".

OpenSolaris was the free software counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems, which included a CDDL-licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued the project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active open-source System V derivative.

ARPANET

In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of Network Unix by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Unix system was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time, Unix required a license from Bell Telephone Laboratories that cost US$20,000 for non-university institutions, while universities could obtain a license for a nominal fee of $150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license.

The RFC specifically mentions that Unix "offers powerful local processing facilities in terms of user programs, several compilers, an editor based on QED, a versatile document preparation system, and an efficient file system featuring sophisticated access control, mountable and de-mountable volumes, and a unified treatment of peripherals as special files." The latter permitted the Network Control Program (NCP) to be integrated within the Unix file system, treating network connections as special files that could be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls, which included the added benefit of closing all connections on program exit, should the user neglect to do so. The modular design of Unix allowed them "to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel", with much of the NCP code in a swappable user process, running only when needed.

Branding

Promotional license plate by Digital Equipment Corporation

 

HP9000 workstation running HP-UX, a certified Unix operating system

In October 1993, Novell, the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group), and in 1995 sold the related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2006, SCO v. Novell, which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case. Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title.

The present owner of the trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "Unix-like").

By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group. Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX, EulerOS, HP-UX, Inspur K-UX, IRIX, macOS, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1), and z/OS. Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant.

Sometimes a representation like Un*x, *NIX, or *N?X is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk (*) and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group.

The Open Group requests that UNIX is always used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as system to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark.

Unix was the original formatting, but the usage of UNIX remains widespread because it was once typeset in small caps (Unix). According to Dennis Ritchie, when presenting the original Unix paper to the third Operating Systems Symposium of the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps". Many of the operating system's predecessors and contemporaries used all-uppercase lettering, so many people wrote the name in upper case due to force of habit. It is not an acronym.

Trademark names can be registered by different entities in different countries and trademark laws in some countries allow the same trademark name to be controlled by two different entities if each entity uses the trademark in easily distinguishable categories. The result is that Unix has been used as a brand name for various products including bookshelves, ink pens, bottled glue, diapers, hair driers and food containers.

Several plural forms of Unix are used casually to refer to multiple brands of Unix and Unix-like systems. Most common is the conventional Unixes, but Unices, treating Unix as a Latin noun of the third declension, is also popular. The pseudo-Anglo-Saxon plural form Unixen is not common, although occasionally seen. Sun Microsystems, developer of the Solaris variant, has asserted that the term Unix is itself plural, referencing its many implementations.