The authors of this book are not religious. What we are is developers. And as developers, we can recognize good engineering when we see it. And it is undeniable from their performance that bibles are a remarkable feat of engineering. To be honest, we're not exactly sure what bibles even _are_. We didn't much care for them growing up, seeing as their presence at the time seemed to be anti-correlated with important things like sex and fun. But it is an empirical fact that these systems, whatever they are, have outperformed all other persistent data storage formats by several orders of magnitude. Any honest assessment of persistent storage technologies -- from hardware to software, from kernel space to userspace, including but not limited to magnetic core memory, tape archives, spinning magnetic platters, NAND flash storage like SSD and NVMe, relational databases like ~~mysql~~ mariadb and postgres, filesystems like zfs and ext4 authored by the most paranoid and cautious subset of top-tier kernel developers, and all other such technologies at all levels of the stack -- after carefully evaluating all of the above from a dispassionate non-religious engineering point of view, we are forced reluctantly to conclude that most reliable form of data storage is, well, bibles. Every other storage format is wildly unreliable in comparison. It's Elmer Fudd vs Bugs Bunny. Seriously. It's not even close. For all their virtues, neither zfs nor RAID nor the best Enterprise©®™ backup solutions available are likely to preserve your data for multiple millenia, not to mention doing so with consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, for zero cost, with automatic internationalization, replication, and compatability with open source. Speaking of open source, the communities that grew up around these odd data structures have already solved a lot of the problems that we in the various open source communities face today. They've survived countless fork wars, governance dramas, and leadership changes. They hold user group meetups in every country on earth, even in places where the local authorities make doing so illegal. Can we the nerds claim the same thing of ourselves? Hell, even the DEFCON hacker crowd -- perhaps our most free-spirited rebellious sub-family -- bent over submissively for the authorities during covid and went remote. All while these ballsy religious bastards kept meeting up. They get arrested for what they love. They're like the [L0pht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0pht) in the 90s. Aside from old [Mendax](https://time.com/archive/6950549/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange/) I'm not sure many of us have that kind of [balls](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Balls). These folks are more extreme than [Stallman](https://rms.sexy/), but they don't care if you say GNU. And they get open source. Like they really really really want to share their stuff. Maybe too much. There's motherfuckers literally giving this stuff away on the street. It's nuts. This is an impressive set of features, to say the least. We therefore see it as our job to reverse-engineer and understand the data storage format known as bibles, and the open source communities that maintain them, so that this technology may be more widely deployed in non-religious contexts like filesystems, databases, distributed object stores, artificial neural networks, or anywhere the need for persistent data storage is found. Anyways, that's all you need to know about us for now. We'd love to know more about you. Whether you're here to stay or just visiting, we're glad to have you in the community, and we hope you stick around. Love always, -LD See you in [[0|user space]].