8 June 2026
unix
freebsd
architecture
linux
Open the laptop in front of you. If it is a Mac, you
are on certified Unix; every version of macOS from
10.5 Leopard (2007) through 15 Sequoia (2024) is
certified UNIX 03. The phone in your pocket is
Darwin underneath. The Netflix stream you watched
on Friday came off a FreeBSD Open Connect appliance
pushing around 375 Gbps with TLS offload (a
FreeBSD-13 feature by Drew Gallatin and Chelsio);
the fleet pushes over 100 Tbps at peak. PlayStation
4 and 5 boot Sony-customised FreeBSD 9 and 11; over
200 million units have shipped. Juniper Junos has
been FreeBSD-based since July 1998; Junos OS
Evolved (2018) is the parallel Linux-kernel line.
AIX 7 is the only UNIX V7 in production, Solaris is
in sustaining support, HP-UX is fading, z/OS runs a
substantial part of world banking. Linux is not on
this list, not because it does not matter but
because Linux is Unix-like, not Unix
— written from scratch in 1991, GNU userland,
never certified. You have been holding Unix all
morning. Unix Universe ⊣ What Unix Is, 1 of
3.
7 June 2026
licensing
law
freebsd
architecture
A great deal of procurement language at the moment
treats open source as a sovereignty
answer. Open and owned are not
the same word. A licence is not a deed of
ownership; it is a statement of conditions. Three
shelves rather than two: permissive (BSD, MIT,
Apache 2.0) moves ownership cleanly; copyleft (GPL,
LGPL, EUPL-1.2) keeps the code open but absorbs
surrounding code; network copyleft (AGPLv3) closes
the SaaS loophole on the program itself. SSPL is
not OSI-recognised. FreeBSD 10.0 (January 2014)
rebuilt its base on Clang because GPLv3 did not
allow a uniformly permissive base. The xz backdoor
(CVE-2024-3094) discovered by Andres Freund in
March 2024 reminds us that open and
audited are different words. The October
2024 Linux maintainer adjustment is the lever the
Linux Foundation's US registration makes possible.
The CLOUD Act (2018) and Schrems II (2020) codify
the European stake; the same reasoning runs in
Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Brasilia. A licence is
a permission slip; sovereignty is reproducible
local build, audit and signing, and continuous
re-receipt. IT Philosophy ⊣ European
Software Sovereignty, 1 of 3.
6 June 2026
architecture
freebsd
security
web
After almost two hundred posts written under nine
series labels, the labels are coming off. From
tomorrow, this feed runs as a small editorial week
instead. Four days, four ressorts, no series hooks,
no episode counters, no content-marketing furniture.
The series-brand format, after some hundreds of
posts, becomes a procrustean bed: each post arrives
pre-shaped by the masthead it is assigned to, by
the hook symbol that needs to be there because the
hook symbol has always been there. None of the old
work goes away; the archive stands, but no new
pieces are written under the old mastheads. Monday:
Unix Universe. Wednesday: Lean Software. Friday:
Security Review, replacing the interruptive Wire
Fire sitrep with a scheduled weekly column at a
calmer cadence. Sunday: IT Philosophy. The voice
stays: the British editorial tone, the FreeBSD
anchor wherever it earns its place, the honest
disclaimers, the Sunday long-form discipline.
Tomorrow opens the first bow on Sunday: the first
of three pieces on European software sovereignty,
under the title Open Is Not Owned. A small
editorial week begins. Same writer, four angles,
sharper form. The hooks come off; the work does
not.
5 June 2026
licensing
law
devops
architecture
You wrote your first Terraform configuration in 2014
or 2017, on a licence you understood. In August
2023 HashiCorp quietly changed it. Terraform, Vault,
Consul, Nomad, Packer and Boundary went from MPL
2.0 to the Business Source License 1.1. In April
2024 IBM announced a $6.4 billion acquisition; it
closed on 27 February 2025. BSL 1.1 is not OSI
Open Source; the Additional Use Grant forbids
"production use that competes with HashiCorp's
commercial offering", ambiguous by design. Each
release reverts to MPL 2.0 four years after
publication. OpenTofu was forked fifteen days after
the announcement, accepted into the Linux
Foundation on 20 September 2023; OpenTofu 1.6
shipped in January 2024 as a drop-in. OpenBao
followed for Vault in December 2024. Beyond BSL:
Pulumi and Crossplane. This is the sixth distinct
lock-in genus: lock-in by retroactive adoption, the
hooks retrofitted onto a tool already in production.
You wrote infrastructure as code so the next
engineer could read it. You did not promise the
next licence-holder would let them. In the Net
Episode 06.
4 June 2026
unix
freebsd
architecture
linux
In the summer of 1969 Ken Thompson had three weeks
of uninterrupted time at Bell Labs. He wrote the
first version of Unix on a PDP-7 with four
kilobytes of memory. With Dennis Ritchie and Rudd
Canaday the team built a hierarchical filesystem,
processes, pipes, and one idea that has carried
half a century without much fading: the file as the
universal interface. A device, a pipe, a socket, a
process listing, all opened, read, written and
closed through the same system calls. ioctl is the
honest escape hatch. Plan 9 (Pike, Thompson,
Presotto, Winterbottom, 1992) followed the idea
through: even the window system was a file system.
On FreeBSD the discipline is intact: devfs since
5.0 (2003), GELI as /dev/<name>.eli,
ZFS volumes under /dev/zvol/, bhyve
under /dev/vmm/. Linux has, in some
corners, drifted: D-Bus (2002), systemd (2010),
Netlink, eBPF. None are wrong; the cumulative
effect is that the file is now one of several
interfaces rather than the interface. Ritchie's
verdict on Plan 9 that Unix did not follow through
has, read against 2026 Linux, rotated by 180
degrees. One interface, infinite implementations.
A Unix one-liner reads almost like a sentence
because every noun in it is a file. By Design
Episode 07.
