Why HEIR?

I can bet you are reading this article from a device with a bright display, memory, a processor, and an energy source. That device is connected to the internet, a global web of undersea cables, data centers, routing protocols, and radio frequencies working in concert so that these words could travel from a server somewhere in the world and render, pixel by pixel, on your screen. Before you even read the first sentence, a browser had to interpret code, an operating system had to manage resources, and hardware built from silicon mined from the earth had to execute billions of operations per second.

If you try to do an exercise of understanding the details of each piece that makes reading this article possible, you would need to rediscover the whole world, and it would take you more than 1,000 lifetimes. This means one thing: we don't understand 99.999% of the things that we interact with on a daily basis, but still, we trust them with our lives. Some are so well-designed that there are ones who may think that they are features that the world came with from the start. And there's nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite, that's how communities are supposed to function.

The interesting point is that these technologies didn't appear out of nowhere; they started from nothing, from imprecise beginnings, and over time became reliable because groups of people worked and designed them in a way that made them trustworthy. And if there hadn't been other groups of people to pick up where the last group left off, the technology would have died, and we would have collapsed as a society.

This is what we want to celebrate with Heir: a world in which you don't need to know everything, a society where each generation doesn't need to rediscover the world, a world of heritage.

Heir is not the last Kubernetes distribution. Kubernetes is not the last container orchestration tool. Containers are not the last Linux namespace abstraction. Linux is not the last operating system. x86 and ARM are not the last CPU architectures. Transistors are not the last switching mechanism. Silicon is not the last material. Nothing is good enough to be considered final, everything is just a bridge to what comes next, something bigger and better.