Unix is both a technology and an idea

Yes, it uses the Linux kernel, and several components born on the Linux world and that is about it.

Only Google and OEM partners get to see that layer, and those that root their devices.

Nothing on the Android userspace, the Java and Kotlin frameworks, or the NDK official APIs have anything to do with Linux in any kind, form and fashion.

As for putting UNIX in a pedestal, most of the so called culture, is mostly circled around nerd circles, hardly ever noticed in big iron commercial UNIXes, and now that most of them faded away, gets passed by as a kind of old culture myth told during cold nights around the fire.

As for the technology, the UNIX haters book exists for a reason, had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX from the get go, and most likely it wouldn't have picked up steam on the market.

Being source tapes available for symbolic prices, when compared with the real cost of a commercial OS on the 1970's, is of course a different matter.

I find great that at least the mobile OSes, and cloud infrastructure nowadays focus on other stacks, instead of being yet another UNIX clone, no need for OS monoculture stuck in the past.

Signed, a recovered UNIX zealot.

In particular I'm referring to the principles of composability and universal interfaces. These principles make the Unix philosophy inherently democratizing - when you apply it you're producing something that's intended to interoperate with other agents in a diverse ecosystem beyond your control. This is in stark contrast to the monoliths that tend to emerge from proprietary software development where the socioeconomic goals are to control everything strictly and limit interoperability because there's commercial value in having a "moat" or a "walled garden" which people can't escape.

As computers become interwoven with our lives and our society the general purpose computer has become a tool like the printing press. The printing press was a precursor for democracy as we know it because it enabled the dissemination of information on a scale that was previously impossible.

What sort of social progress we might ultimately achieve through the general purpose computer is yet to be fully determined. But in the modern era we have many examples of what the competing philosophy of proprietary monoliths looks like - it's a hellscape where more your time and attention are harnessed by the monolith's owner, to serve his own ends, even at the detriment of your health and well-being [2].

Facebook and Instagram wouldn't be killing our children if they had been designed around the Unix principles of composability and a universal interface. How many people have lamented their inability to take their data, content and relationships away from Meta's silo? It's a constant refrain in our industry that people wish they could get away from a service that started out great and gradually "enshittified" - had these services been designed with the Unix philosophy in mind, it would be possible.

Either way, the Unix philosophy is now just as much about your human freedom and well-being, as it is about whether your code works well.

Stallman of course saw this coming decades ago and predicted with disturbing prescience - that "either the user would control the program, or the program would control the user."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

Anyway what's wrong about Unix is that it assumes that users need to be protected from each other (good) but installed binaries can be somehow trusted (bad). We're in the internet age now where we download so many executable code that we need better sandboxing, as part of the OS.