The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I reckon. Real world needed distributed systems, and neural networks, and crypto math, and hardware design, and …
There’s still a place for academic research but it’s a much different place in the Gilded CPU Age. It’s the god of the non-commercial gaps: for a while there if it seemed like it’d make money, someone .com giant with gigabucks of free cash had someone on it. Why work for a university if gigabucks.com is hiring?
Not saying USENIX didn’t have factions. I just question the word “capture” about academics, who invented all this stuff before there was money in it. It feels like retiring the Annual Technical Conference is the final step in Usenix’s capture by industry.
Only if one categorizes academics as a research arm of military funded research goals. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but let's be intellectually honest.
> UNIX is a product of a quasi-academic research lab.
A wholly owned subsidiary of the commercial entity AT&T as far as the UNIX trademark is concerned. The BSD family would have something to say about Unix (note case difference) however.
> The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I reckon. Real world needed distributed systems ...
Distributed systems and the networking protocols now assumed (TCP and UDP) was a battle fought before the late 90's. See Novell[0] for an alternative many espoused at the time and Sun's "The Network is the Computer" mantra from the mid 80's.
> Not saying USENIX didn’t have factions. I just question the word “capture” about academics, who invented all this stuff before there was money in it.
There was always "money in it." Academic funding is, by definition, justifying the allocation of money for the advancement of knowledge often pitched as relevant to the benefactor. Again, not that there is anything wrong with this.
USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and real use of Unix. It was the Unix User's Group.
But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to flood USENIX ATC and smother it.
Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.
However, at least speaking as an academic, I wouldn't say that ~20% acceptance rate is necessarily indicative of a shortage of good venues. There is plenty of not-so-good research that is submitted to top places that has no hope of getting in. (My experience is from computer security research, where the acceptance rate of security conferences has gone down, but the fraction of good papers has also actually gone down, so the fraction of good papers getting in has roughly stayed the same.)
That being said, ATC seems to indeed have been a high-prestige conference back in the day, and hence indeed competitive. My experience is from recent years, where it was viewed as a good-but-not-tier-1 conference in systems research.
One thing I didn't mention but certainly believe: academics were attracted to USENIX ATC because of its attendance count (especially at the height of the Dot Com boom when it had nearly 2,000 attendees!) -- but no one really took apart who was attending or what they were looking for. So the conference became more academic because of the attendee count -- but that it became more academic also drove the attendee count down. (I heard from a lot of practitioners who attended that they struggled to find sessions that were relevant to their work in even the broadest sense.) I know I link to it in the piece, but I think Rik Farrow's piece[0] really got right to the heart of all of this.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fal...
I do think that you correctly identified a major source of the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved) and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc).
And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can find channels for distributing and publicizing their work that don't go through program committees. Open source is definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in systems software since 2004, for instance.
For example, one of the linked talks from 2016 "A Wardrobe for the Emperor" [0] talks about adding a more social website features (stars, likes, comments, feedback, etc.) to arXiv to improve it. He also talks about the "Papers we love" meetups, which are in person.
I think the Usenix ATC is a highlighting a deeper problem and that it is happening across other conferences, journals and disciplines. I don't have a good theory of why. I think Cantrill's observations are part of the puzzle but I don't have a good sense for why things changed so drastically (and I think they have, compared to 20-40 years ago).
A final note: given that OSDI is on your list of prestigious conferences, the way the program committee was conducted in 2010 (which I outlined in my ATC keynote[0]) should be particularly galling.
[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor...
Anybody remember the January 21–23 '87 Winter Usenix in Washington, DC, that got snowed in by the giant "Blizzard of Discontent" with 14 inches of snow that closed down Metro? The beloved/infamous Mayor Marion "The Bitch Set Me Up" Barry was attending the Super Bowl in California at the time, a fine tradition that Ted Cruz honored in Cancun during the February 2021 winter storm in Texas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSRW18ahWG0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5KAw9MHeP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZSROdXWTTc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTMif8cGlcE
Or the one after it on June 8–12 '87 Summer Usenix in Phoenix, Arizona, where they took everybody to a dude ranch for steak? My friend ||ugh Daniel was a vegetarian, and didn't want steak, so they told him to "git" into that line over "yonder", which he did. When he got to the front of the line, they plopped a half of a chicken onto his plate, like that's what a vegetarian wants to see and eat for dinner.
And "DEV HORSE" for Phoenix.
[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor...
Usenix ATC Announcement
Usenix ATC Announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933511 - May 2025 (10 comments)
With all respect, however, this industry/academia dualism looks to me at best as a false and at worst as a harmful dichotomy. I mean, there are similarly cliché pathologies in whatever one chooses to overload "industry" with. There are successful academic projects that end up in industry (RISC-V) and successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust). At the end of the day, everyone wants to build something. Tools and methods are needed. Some of them may not exist yet. The act of building one's tools and methods (or something completely new with existing tools and methods) is research regardless from where it happens or how it is labelled.
Why is this not enough? What extra benefits go with differentiating myself as either an academic or a practitioner? Honest question!
POV: CompEng PhD looking for industrial vacancies.
Is Rust loved by academics? And much more importantly in my mind, was it even recognized by academics before it became an industrial success?
The very first published Rust paper that I'm aware of appeared in the "ACM SIGAda Ada Letters" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2692956.2663188). Today that paper is the most cited paper to ever appear in that journal (which has a 4 decade history) and it's not even close. It also has more citations that all but three papers that appeared at PLDI that same year, for comparison. That certainly doesn't suggest to me that it was recognized at the time. This was also published only 6 months before Rust shipped 1.0. It wasn't that early.
My (third-hand and now-decade-old, so take it for the very little it's worth) recollection is that academic forums weren't interested in Rust because nothing in it is particularly novel in a PL theory sense (a point Graydon himself made from the very beginning, see slides 6 and 7 at http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf). But it did package those ideas into something that was practically usable for industry and at this point the results speak for themselves.
IMO this is a good example of why a lot of "practitioners" in industry wouldn't bother trying to publish anything in a forum dominated by academics.
This wasn't academic capture. There's a simpler explanation. No one goes to talks anymore.
I understand that I am in the minority here when it comes to remote work, etc, but if opportunities to learn from and socialize in person with colleagues go away, then I will too. Woodworkers don’t seem so enamored with virtual this and that, so I would probably jump ship and do something else.