One thing I've realized about the Linux community through all this systemd flame warring is how unbelievably conservative a large subsection of it is. There's this huge so-called "neckbeard" continent that views anything architecturally beyond the 1980s as a huge affront to Unix.
IMHO I kind of shrug at this, since Unix was never really all that great to begin with. Unix won because the only commercially viable and well supported alternative was Windows, an OS that was (and in many ways still is) significantly worse especially for server and embedded applications. Everyone rallied around Unix and especially free/open Unix as an alternative, and so here we are.
It's also tough to compete with free, and Unix OSes got a huge boost from both Linux and the various free flavors of BSD. Yet that boost came at the expense of things like BeOS, Plan9, original NeXT, and the OS I still feel is hiding behind the JVM ... which for their day represented fresh ideas that might have gone somewhere.
Ultimately I think the existing Unix paradigm is going to be killed by Docker and mobile OSes that containerize in similar ways, and I'm not sure this is a step forward. It escapes much of the ugliness and the poor permission model of Unix, but it does so by handing virtually everything to the app. Docker containers (and mobile apps) can be thought of as something almost akin to giant statically linked binaries. We're getting more monolithic and coarse-grained.
IMHO I kind of shrug at this, since Unix was never really all that great to begin with. Unix won because the only commercially viable and well supported alternative was Windows, an OS that was (and in many ways still is) significantly worse especially for server and embedded applications. Everyone rallied around Unix and especially free/open Unix as an alternative, and so here we are.
It's also tough to compete with free, and Unix OSes got a huge boost from both Linux and the various free flavors of BSD. Yet that boost came at the expense of things like BeOS, Plan9, original NeXT, and the OS I still feel is hiding behind the JVM ... which for their day represented fresh ideas that might have gone somewhere.
Ultimately I think the existing Unix paradigm is going to be killed by Docker and mobile OSes that containerize in similar ways, and I'm not sure this is a step forward. It escapes much of the ugliness and the poor permission model of Unix, but it does so by handing virtually everything to the app. Docker containers (and mobile apps) can be thought of as something almost akin to giant statically linked binaries. We're getting more monolithic and coarse-grained.