Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric S. Raymond

The delicious sting here is in “hostile observer”: Raymond isn’t describing a neutral analyst reading market signals, but someone eager to write Unix’s obituary. That choice frames 1993 not as a technical turning point so much as a cultural moment of attempted erasure. Unix, by then, looked splintered and tired in the public narrative: AT&T’s long shadow, vendor infighting, and the rising confidence of Microsoft’s PC empire made the whole ecosystem seem like yesterday’s religion. To a detractor, it was easy to mistake fragmentation for collapse.

Raymond’s real target is the lazy equation of commercial dominance with historical inevitability. “Almost played out” is a theater metaphor, implying a final act already scheduled; he’s mocking the certainty with which outsiders declare a living system “over” because it isn’t winning the current scoreboard. The line also treats “the Unix story” as mythology, not product: a saga with heroes, schisms, and continuity beyond any single corporate sponsor.

Then comes the kicker: “the hacker tribe.” Calling hackers a tribe is both romantic and strategic. It suggests durable identity, shared norms, and a sense of belonging that survives market cycles. The subtext is that if Unix falls, a whole mode of building and thinking falls with it. In hindsight, the sentence reads like a setup for the reversal Raymond helped narrate: 1993 as the calm before Linux and open source reframe Unix not as a dying platform, but as the seedbed for the modern internet’s operating culture.