why does deep space nine keep running what is essentially a cardassian operating system. give that thing to the right nerd and they'd have Linux running on it in a weekend
since this post did well, here's some cool/good additions people made:
You think it was tough to get wifi drivers working in the 00s? Imagine the entire hardware stack is totally non-standard, up to and including the firmware that controls stuff like "breathable air" and "keeping the doors unlocked". And if you think the failure conditions for those systems aren't hostile to the developer, the end user, and life itself, you have never spoken to a Cardassian.
Look, we all know those devs who make things needlessly arcane and undocumented just to keep themselves in a job. On Cardassia Prime, that's considered an engineering best practice. There are three people in the quadrant who know the protocol for opening the docking bay and none of them will explain it to you for anything short of a high-ranking position in the bureaucracy and the title to an estate in the demilitarized zone.
The only reason anything gets done at all is only because O'Brien spent his free time during the war reading technical manuals he'd scavenged from overrun Cardassian outposts, and the pressure from Central Command to make the OS itself comprehensible enough that training new military engineers was cheap. But the drivers? If you think you can get them talking to Linux without a fully staffed university department and a five year grant, you're dreaming.
I think Nat makes a great point, and I want to bring up hardware in a different way: this is not a warship, or a local to federation space thing, this is a cardassian box meant to administrate a suppression campaign against a subjugated people. Star fleet is using it as a generalized space station. The ships are now not mostly cardassian.
What makes you think that you can just physically slam down federation station tech and have it work with your station and all possible incoming craft with minimal downtime? Oh I can get around the drivers--like hell you can. I bet ships have expectations written into their shit about how to deal with DS9 and changes on your side are changes on their side. So your 'it'll be better for everyone' sparkly new subsystem will have all those deep connections to internal systems, but ALSO expectations for docking ships, and when those processes don't work, docking bays take damage that puts them out of commission. You can't just change things like that without having a way to update everyone's playbook for docking. And it'll still not be standard because of the hull or comms or whatever!
