Linux is everywhere. I use it, and so do you. We all do. If not on your laptop, probably on your phone, TV, or some connected accessory. You may also be a GNU/Linux convert, advocate, or even developer. Whichever your exact scenario may be, we are all riding the Linux wave in a way or another. This text is meant for you, fellow free software campaigner, FOSS system administrator, open source hacker, opinionated LKML reader, GNU power user or occasional tech enthusiast of any flavour, as we all share common legacy, collective ancestry, whether we know it or not.

Say you use Linux as a daily driver, and find it amazing? It is; and so are others! Heard the “Linux revolution” changed everything? It did; not quite by itself! Read that Linux is “superior”, morally or technically? It may be; though only part of a much larger story! Believe GNU/Linux to be the rebel alliance fighting the Empire? It certainly used to be; the landscape has shifted, in all honesty. Sense that Linux is all we talk about at the system layer? Yes, quite frankly; sadly so, if you ask me. Now, you may have wondered how each moving part of Linux came to be? Yes or no, what if we took a peek under the hood, and let it tell us a story?

Hey ho, let’s go!

Dense & layered genealogy

$user

Drag’n’dropping windows in a GUI daily? Wayland today, X11 yesterday: it all started with MIT’s Project Athena in 1983. On your desktop still, most anything you see in 3D speaks OpenGL, which was born on SGI’s UNIX in 19921. Speaking of graphics, if Doom or Quake rocked your world in the 90s like it did mine, know that id Software developed both games on NeXTcube, the legendary UNIX black box that took the industry by storm in that era2. Back to text, what about terminal rendering colors, cursor moves, escape codes? termcap in 1BSD (1978) → terminfo by Mary Ann Horton in System V3.

$sysadmin

Connecting to a server over ssh? You’re using OpenSSH, created by OpenBSD4. Attaching a tmux session? OpenBSD adjacent. Your distro uses LibreSSL? OpenBSD again, cleaning up OpenSSL after Heartbleed. Rendering man pages on Alpine Linux? mandoc, from OpenBSD too. Editing with vi, vim or nvim? You have Bill Joy to thank for it (BSD, 1976)5. Your packet filter? nftables modernized iptables in OpenBSD pf’s declarative spirit6. Scheduling tasks? cron, BSD (1987). Resolving DNS? gethostbyname, 4.3BSD (1986). Running a nameserver? Probably BIND, 4.3BSD too, then ISC. The boring infrastructure of every Linux server relies on this very lineage.7

$archivist

Mounting directories over NFS? You’re talking to SunOS code from 19848. Accessing Linux files from Windows in WSL2? 9P, Plan 9’s network file protocol from 19899. Running ZFS on your NAS, overhearing experts say it’s all the rage? Born in Solaris 20+ years ago, kept open and refined by illumos, made cross-platform by OpenZFS!10 Btrfs and bcachefs have been trying to catch up ever since11. Heard good things about XFS? Born within SGI12 IRIX in 1994. JFS? AIX from IBM, 1990. Managing logical volumes with LVM? HP-UX (1992). Using the Linux default? ext2 was directly modeled on FFS, the 4.2BSD Fast File System from 1983.

$devops

Firing up OS or application containers? FreeBSD pioneered the concept in 2000 with jails13, Solaris Zones refined it in 2004, years before LXC1415. Docker made it ubiquitous16, but Solaris had been running unmodified Linux binaries via lx-branded zones since 200717. While Docker for Mac ran on a port of FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor18, the kernel primitives — mount namespaces & clone(2) — trace back to Plan 9 (1989)19. Overlayfs, the layer storage every Docker image stacks on? Plan 9’s union directories. Booting through systemd? Inspired by launchd from macOS, prefigured by SMF from Solaris20.

$programmer

Debugging with bpftrace? Half 4.4BSD (BPF, 1992), half Solaris (DTrace language)21. Capturing packets with tcpdump? libpcap from 4.4BSD. Writing Go22? Limbo descent, the language of Inferno (1996)23. Compiling with clang/LLVM? Darwin needed a non-GPL alternative to gcc, and Linux inherited the result24. The toolchain itself? GNU’s userland was written across 40 years by hundreds of contributors, predating the Linux kernel by a decade25. Building Gentoo Linux with Portage? Modeled on FreeBSD ports (1994). Installing software via pkgsrc? NetBSD, 1997, first cross-platform packaging system ever, still maintained to this day26.

$netsurfer

Sending texts in UTF-8? Pike & Thompson at Plan 9 (1992)27. Accessing the Internet? Every TCP/IP stack inherits 4.2BSD’s design (1983)28. The BSD sockets API is forty-plus years old and unchanged, macOS’ implementation still uses BSD code, and even Windows NT did so for a while29. Plugging a printer or a speaker? Apple invented mDNS, known on Linux as Avahi30. Running Firefox or Android? jemalloc from FreeBSD. Navigating the web? Tim Berners-Lee built the first browser & the first web server on NeXTSTEP at CERN in 199031, whose own TCP/IP was BSD-derived. The protocols, the first server, the first browser… none of it was Linux.

Linux, alone in the cosmos?

A world teeming with life

Look closer. While Netflix & Sony’s PlayStation running FreeBSD may be common knowledge by now32, the rest of the iceberg is less visible. Messaging? Hotmail33 & WhatsApp34 ran on FreeBSD as well. Juniper’s routers? FreeBSD there too35. Time Capsule backups? NetBSD (just like your toaster, maybe?)36. Driving? Your car’s dashboard probably runs QNX. Processing? Intel CPUs have silently embedded MINIX 3 since 201537, though probably not for a good reason. However nefarious this may be, the teaching OS Torvalds learned UNIX on became one of the most-installed operating systems on the planet, bypassing his own by a margin!

The point is not to belittle Linux, nor to revive the OS wars38. GNU/Linux has become indispensable39, and so have the Linux-native components: cgroups, the scheduler, KVM, drivers for everything that ships. But some of the features getting praised are things GNU/Linux received40, rather than things it originated. Whenever you celebrate the running system, you are also celebrating all of the BSDs, Solaris & illumos41, Plan 9 & the original UNIX, amongst others — whether you know them or not, whether you like them or not, whether you care about them or not. I do think you should care, especially if you value Linux: it’d be nowhere near where it is now without the tireless contributions of these other systems — their devs, sponsors, communities — some of whom had little to nothing to gain, but did it anyway. Naming them is the least we can do.

Linux is everywhere, it is true: Linux workloads power most of the cloud, dominate datacentres, and ping from people’s pockets through Android all across the world. But it is definitely not alone, and the other half or so quietly runs something else in the background: from Apple deploying UNIX at scale42 to most (if not all) of the aforementioned projects pushing forward in distinct capacities, the linuxification of systems is certainly not absolute. Redox & Asterinas are rebuilding UNIX & Linux from scratch in Rust, SerenityOS43 & Genode in C++. 9front resurrected Plan 9 into a lively, irreverent community of creative hackers44, Haiku carries BeOS forward, and a handful of volunteers somehow keep the GNU Hurd afloat after thirty-plus years45.

Meanwhile, Oxide folks seem to be channeling the free-spirited creativity and reverence for the “days of the UNIX workstation” (explicitly à la Sun46) to bridge past, present, and future, enabling old & new generations of engineers to advance the UNIX tradition47. They have shown that it’s still possible to build a vertically-integrated computer company: shipping hyperscaler-grade racks for on-premise cloud, powered by their own illumos distro, Helios48. Far from fighting Linux, they enable it at scale, and they do so by committing to an ecosystem many dismissed as a relic. Going against the grain, Oxide founders deemed Solaris’ primitives, history, and engineering quality the right toolset for the problem they set out to solve49. Looks like diversity is recombining, not dying!

Carriers across motives

From creative tinkerers on campuses amidst the psychedelic era to early digital counter-cultures, from open source as an embodiment of collective intelligence to cyberspace utopias, from hackerspaces to server collectives & community ISPs… the UNIX legacy enabled much more than the polished “Linux revolution” narrative tends to bury: free software was never just about software. The very motions that enabled the plural-OS substrate I’ve been documenting — refusing monoculture, distributing power, treating users as participants rather than products — encompass social, technical & political propositions that go beyond mere engineering problems: tech can be for the people, by the people, not just deployed onto them.

As partial as our inventory may be, another pattern emerges clearly: FOSS has worked across motives that don’t always coexist easily. From long-running FSF copyleft & BSD permissive rivalry to DARPA-funded 4.xBSD or NSA-written SELinux, from commercial vendors paying engineers to individual maintainers writing Vim or GnuPG mostly unfunded for a quarter of a century, from big tech contributing for strategic reasons that simultaneously benefit the commons to stewardship companies funding engineering on non-mainstream lineages because they believe in correctness above all else, it’s not just radical hackers or industry. It’s a multi-motive ecology of ecosystems whose natural habitats vary greatly, and yet, overlap tactically. Cross-pollination works, whether the carriers are libre software activists, open source practitioners, commercial vendors, university researchers, defense contractors, lone maintainers or strategic-corporate actors: what gets carried outlasts whoever carried it.

Either way, none of the aforementioned projects, however focused & opinionated their devs may behave, however hellbent on rc.d vs systemd their userbase may be, however welcoming their space may have become to keyboard rebels fleeing those who raged against the machine yesterday, only to become its cogs today… none of them need to displace Linux in order to preserve option-value: the resilience monoculture cannot offer when commercial collapse, vendor lock-in or political capture come for you. Each is sustained by communities doing real maintenance, often unpaid, mostly unseen, be it NetBSD porters keeping a fifty-architecture codebase clean, OpenZFS folks keeping the tree across platforms, or dozens of others doing the tedious work nobody else does. The connective tissue that enabled this history — POSIX, IETF protocols, codified formats — is still there because people who care tend to it. Standards & stacks don’t maintain themselves. Cross-pollination is what living systems do, and monoculture tends to be what dying ones do.

Tending the ecology

Whether the substrate lives & grows in density is up to us. We can be the people who use it, maintain it, fund it. The people who cross-compile for platforms that shouldn’t be left behind. The people who run non-aligned systems instead of going down the beaten path. The people who contribute code & documentation, time & dedication, art & songs50, heart & mind. The people who test and drive, who speak and write about these projects, past & present, so they can’t be wiped from collective memory, so the contributors feel the love and keep building, so the servers keep humming while the workloads keep flowing. This is an invitation to widen our scope, reclaim our history, acknowledge the depth of our collective foundations, so they can no longer be faded into invisible contributions. Let’s stay humble, curious, adventurous: if you walk away from this read willing to give one of these systems a spin, I’ll take that as a win!

Cross-pollination isn’t a state. It’s a practice. Don’t stay in your lane, become part of the broader UNIX family!

Our call, your call!

May 2026, veg,
longtime sysadmin,
#foreverlearning practitioner,
UNIX Social Club founder

Notes & references

  1. OpenGL was released by SGI as an industry standard in 1992, derived from their proprietary IrisGL (1982); passed to the Khronos Group, whose Vulkan (2016) extends the line. Those roots still drive the graphics stack on Linux desktops. ↩︎

  2. doom (1993) & quake (1996) were both developed by John Carmack & John Romero on NeXTcube workstations. Doom has since become the de facto standard for cross-platform portability, running on pretty much anything with a microcontroller, from pregnancy tests to IBM mainframes, as catalogued on r/itrunsdoom. ↩︎

  3. Mary Ann Horton authored terminfo at AT&T (1981–82), included in System V Release 2. Every Linux terminal still uses her work. The New Curses and Terminfo Package (USENIX Summer 1982) is the canonical paper. ↩︎

  4. OpenSSH was forked from the last freely-redistributable release of Tatu Ylönen’s original SSH (1995), maintained by OpenBSD since 1999, used on every Linux server’s ssh connections since! ↩︎

  5. Bill Joy originally wrote vi as a visual mode of ex at Berkeley in 1976, becoming a distinct command in 2BSD (1979). Joy went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982, carrying the BSD line with him: vi, csh, the BSD socket layer & FFS became Sun’s foundation, made universal by POSIX. ↩︎

  6. Originally written in 2001 to replace IPFilter after a licence dispute, OpenBSD pf ships across all the BSDs and as macOS’s default firewall since Lion (2011), via FreeBSD’s port: millions of Mac users run an OpenBSD firewall without knowing it. ↩︎

  7. Paul Vixie’s cron (1987) is the universal scheduler ancestor. BIND started at UC Berkeley (1984) and migrated to ISC in 1996, where it is still maintained. The resolver library (gethostbyname, getaddrinfo) is what every Linux process uses for name resolution. ISC also originated dhcpd & dhclient, the BSD-style licensed DHCP suite most Linux distros defaulted to for years. ↩︎

  8. NFS was built for SunOS 2.0 in 1984 (NFSv2 spec, 1989), still anchoring most Linux storage interop. Sun’s broader contributions to the Linux world run much deeper46. ↩︎

  9. Plan 9 was Bell Labs’ « what if we did UNIX again? » project, designed & built primarily by Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Phil Winterbottom, Dave Presotto, Tom Duff, plus Russ Cox & others later on. While Plan 9 stayed niche, its ideas sure didn’t, as most of its architectural lessons & protocols trickled down into modern systems & networking. ↩︎

  10. ZFS launched in Solaris 10 6/06 (2006); after Oracle closed Solaris in 2010, illumos kept the source tree open, acting as the upstream zfs for FreeBSD, macOS & ZFS-on-Linux ports, up until OpenZFS 2.0 (late 2020) led one of the most ambitious & sustained open source inter-OS collaborations. ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. Apple announced ZFS as macOS’s future filesystem in 2007, quietly switched gears in 2009, and eventually delivered an in-house rewrite: APFS. ↩︎

  12. SGI ported XFS to Linux themselves in 2001, and contributed much more40. ↩︎

  13. FreeBSD jails debuted in FreeBSD 4.0 (2000), predating LXC (2008) and Docker (2013) by 8–13 years15. While Kamp & Watson’s Jails: Confining the omnipotent root paper (SANE 2000) remains the foundational primary, Bryan Cantrill’s “On Jails and Solaris Zones” (Papers We Love NYC, 2016) offers an energetic retelling of the road to modern containers. ↩︎

  14. Solaris Zones appeared in Solaris 10 beta (2004), with Price & Tucker’s LISA 2004 paper as the founding reference; conceptual ancestor of Linux cgroups (2008). ↩︎

  15. In all fairness, a couple of options pre-existed as out-of-tree patchsets: Jacques Gélinas released linux-vserver as early as 2001, and Virtuozzo open-sourced OpenVZ in 2005. LXC followed once container primitives had landed mainline, years later. ↩︎ ↩︎

  16. Even Docker’s name traces back to legacy-UNIX vocabulary. The term « container » was coined by Sun with Solaris Containers (Zones + resource management) in 2004; Linux Containers inherited both the concepts and the language. ↩︎

  17. Joyent revived lx-branded zones for its illumos-derived hypervisor SmartOS (2011), and productised them for cloud workloads in 2014. Triton DataCenter is its cluster-orchestration layer, an alternative to Kubernetes. ↩︎

  18. xhyve is the macOS port of FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor. ↩︎

  19. Plan 9 namespaces (1989+) are where Linux’s mount namespaces, clone(2), and overlayfs primitives reach back to, continued in 9front. ↩︎

  20. SMF (Service Management Facility, Solaris 10) & launchd (macOS 10.4 Tiger) both landed in 2005, predating systemd (2010). Lennart Poettering openly cited launchd as direct inspiration for systemd in his 2010 essay “Rethinking PID 1”. ↩︎ ↩︎

  21. DTrace in Solaris (2003) was ported to macOS Leopard in 2007, to FreeBSD in 2008, and partly integrated to bpftrace on Linux in 2018. Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems (USENIX 2004) is the seminal paper, and “DTrace at 21” (P99 CONF, 2024) adds Cantrill’s retrospective. ↩︎ ↩︎

  22. Russ Cox, a longtime Plan 9 contributor, joined the Go team at Google, carrying Plan 9’s design sensibility forward. Rob Pike, Ken Thompson & Robert Griesemer co-led the original Go drafting, whose concurrency model descends directly from Limbo (Inferno’s language 23) & CSP. ↩︎ ↩︎

  23. Inferno is a distributed OS born at Bell Labs (1995–96), shaped by Rob Pike, Phil Winterbottom, Sean Dorward, Howard Trickey and others as a Plan 9 follow-up tailored for networked devices. In addition to its channels & processes fostering Go22, its Styx protocol became Plan 9’s 9P2000. Once stewarded by Vita Nuova, now community-maintained on GitHub. ↩︎ ↩︎

  24. LLVM started as Chris Lattner’s university work (2000), Apple-sponsored from 2005 to provide a non-GPL toolchain for Darwin, iOS & macOS. ↩︎

  25. Stallman announced the GNU project eight years before the first Linux kernel release. By 1991, most of “Linux’s userland” already existed (gcc, emacs, bash, coreutils). The proprietary turn at MIT AI Lab (1981–82) precipitated Stallman’s commitment to building software users could read, study, modify & share, and the GPL family became the legal framework of the Linux kernel & most of GNU/Linux’s userland, sustained by the FSF (1985+). ↩︎

  26. pkgsrc was created at NetBSD in 1997: the first cross-platform package management system, descended from FreeBSD’s ports (1994). ↩︎

  27. UTF-8 was invented by Rob Pike & Ken Thompson in 1992 over dinner at a New Jersey diner during Plan 9 development. The original blueprint was sketched on a placemat, then standardised through IETF and Unicode, becoming the text encoding of the modern internet. ↩︎

  28. TCP/IP arrived in 4.2BSD (1983), and Linux’s stack followed the Berkeley template. The 90s lawsuit and the 1994 settlement 38 produced the legally redistributable codebase from which FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin descend. ↩︎

  29. The early NT networking stack drew on BSD code (uncredited at the time), amidst a quarter-century of hardline anti-FOSS hostility: the leaked Halloween Documents detailed a strategic war against open source, Steve Ballmer’s infamous “Linux is a cancer” line, the reportedly indirect funding of SCO’s legal campaign against Linux. Years later, corporate opportunism led to a hilarious reversal when cloud-economics flipped: a sudden “we love Linux now” pivot for Microsoft, which subsequently became a top-20 Linux kernel contributor, released WSL2 (a Microsoft-maintained Linux kernel) to billions of Windows desktops, and acquired GitHub. The substrate may have absorbed the contributions either way, but absorption is not absolution, and the campaign that preceded it can’t be erased by retroactive git commits. ↩︎

  30. Apple introduced Bonjour (originally Rendezvous, mDNS, DNS-SD) in 2002, IETF-standardised, implemented on Linux in Avahi. ↩︎

  31. Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web at CERN in March 1989; the first web server, the first browser (WorldWideWeb), and the first website went live in late 1990 on a NeXTSTEP workstation. CERN preserves the original NeXT cube with its hand-written “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” sticker. ↩︎

  32. Netflix Open Connect has run on FreeBSD since ~2012 and its engineers contribute upstream. Sony’s PlayStation has used a BSD-derived OS from the PS3 onwards; a short-lived OtherOS feature loaded Linux as a guest, but is sometimes confused with the system OS, which was always BSD. ↩︎

  33. Hotmail launched July 1996 on FreeBSD, was acquired by Microsoft late 1997, who claimed the service’s migration to Windows 2000 was complete in 2001, but later admitted DNS still ran on FreeBSD, as Windows NT could not handle the workload at scale for years. ↩︎

  34. WhatsApp’s Erlang on FreeBSD architecture served billions of messages with a small engineering team before it was acquired by Facebook in 2014, FreeBSD persisting in the stack until ~2017. ↩︎

  35. Junos has been FreeBSD-derived since 1998 (Juniper engineers contributing upstream), which means a decent chunk of the internet between Linux servers transits FreeBSD-derived routers. ↩︎

  36. Apple’s AirPort Extreme & Time Capsule firmware uses NetBSD. The “of course it runs NetBSD” tagline (covering printers, satellites, vending machines, ATMs, toasters…) reflects NetBSD’s 50+ supported-architectures portability ethos. ↩︎

  37. Intel ME 11 (Skylake, 2015) was the first gen to embed MINIX 3; publicly disclosed in 2017, prompting Tanenbaum’s open letter to Intel. ↩︎

  38. The OS wars of the 1990s, specifically the UNIX wars, happened amidst a critical lawsuit that kept the BSDs in legal limbo for several years (1992–1994), preventing adoption while Linux was gaining traction. By the time the 4.4BSD-Lite settlement allowed the BSDs to be unambiguously & cleanly redistributable (1994), Linux had captured a critical mass of developers. The “Linux headstart” was partly an effect of timing & paralysing legal attacks. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  39. Linux’s specific rise is read several ways, beyond timing38 and absorption40 factors. Commonly invoked mechanisms include commodity x86 hardware support at the height of the PC-clone era, the GPL’s reciprocity mandate forcing derivatives to feed the upstream tree, and a « worse is better) » shipping discipline as opposed to the correctness first patience characterizing most of the other UNICES. ↩︎

  40. The downfall of commercial UNIX has consistently fed Linux. SGI’s long Linux pivot through decline brought XFS, the OpenGL/DRI/Mesa graphics chain, cpusets & NUMA scaffolding into mainline before its 2006 bankruptcy. Sequent’s IBM acquisition (1999) routed RCU to Linux, now core to kernel synchronisation. Sun’s Oracle takeover (2010) closed Solaris but sprung ZFS through illumos into ZoL (ZFS-on-Linux). Apollo’s HP acquisition (1989) seeded Samba’s secondary wire format. DEC engineers’ Alpha port (1994) made Linux 64-bit-clean before x86_64 existed, well before Tru64’s wind-down (1998–2002). Whenever a commercial vendor declined or folded, its engineers, code & engineering lessons flowed downstream, and Linux was the main absorption surface. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  41. Like Linux, illumos has distributions: OmniOS & SmartOS are go-to options for server & hypervisor use, while OpenIndiana or Tribblix enable desktop experiences. ↩︎

  42. macOS is officially UNIX-certified by The Open Group, a status held since macOS 10.5 Leopard (2007). GNU/Linux is not: UNIX-like but not certified. ↩︎

  43. SerenityOS spawned Ladybird, forked into its own non-profit in 2024 by Andreas Kling: a rare new independent browser engine alongside Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko. ↩︎

  44. Plan 9 from Bell Labs development wound down around 2002, and the system was open-sourced (the Plan 9 Foundation took over the copyright in 2021, MIT-relicensing all editions). Circa 2011, 9front revived active development as a rather punk rock community fork. ↩︎

  45. GNU Hurd is GNU’s never quite finished kernel, in development since ~1990; Debian GNU/Hurd ports continue, alive but slow. Linux became GNU’s working kernel by historical happenstance, rather than by design. ↩︎

  46. Sun’s contributions to the Linux ecosystem go way beyond NFS: PAM, NSS, the VFS+vnode model, the slab allocator, the autofs automounter (1992), ONC RPC’s rpcbind, NFSv4 spec leadership (2003), VirtualBox (2008–10), the GNOME accessibility framework, DTrace21, SMF20 & ZFS10. ↩︎ ↩︎

  47. Bryan Cantrill’s “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos” talk (USENIX LISA 2011) provides an articulate retelling of the Sun-to-Oracle transition: engineering culture, the OpenSolaris closure, and the founding of illumos as their living continuation. ↩︎

  48. Oxide Computer (2019+) manufactures integrated server-racks with a deliberately open everything stack: the first commercial server vendor in this generation to do so. Oxide engineers contribute upstream to illumos-gate, and their On the Metal podcast collects firsthand stories from industry veterans across hardware/OS history. ↩︎

  49. Oxide’s RFD 26 documents the founding team’s rationale for the illumos commitment in their own words. RFDs (Requests for Discussion) are Oxide’s public design-doc format, modelled on IETF RFCs. ↩︎

  50. OpenBSD creates original artwork & music with every new release: a tradition where each version has its own cover art and song. ↩︎