government == OS

A long time ago, there was a paper published to the ACM

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Homepage archive

Volume 14 Issue 2, April 1980

After reading this paper, I would like to provide more specific examples of this parallel. However, most analogies break down if examined too closely or stretched too far like how the Standard Model breaks down when stretched to the subatomic level.

The Government is a system of rules to manage resources (wealth, natural resources, people?), the operating system is a system of rules (code) to manage resources (memory, processor time) 

The argument between Tanenbaum and Torvalds, the Microkernel vs Monolithic Kernel designs, is analogous to the big government criticism. What the government is in charge of is a subject of eternal and perineal debate but to help decide this, even more specific parallels can be made.

 For example, sense the fiscal policy manages money and money is like memory, virtual memory systems would be like the treasury department, physical memory is cash and virtual memory is deficit spending and debt is over committed memory. Malloc however is a userspace library. Each program calls malloc but they can use their own memory allocator. We have guidelines in place for managing money responsibly but its still up to you when you need to allocate more (call brk(2) or Sbrk(2))  . 

I guess the USA is a hybrid kernel because some of our functions are left to services or state governments and we're real strict about making sure those states retain their power, its written into the constitution which is kind of like a design document, which brings me to my next point.

Democratic governments are basically Open Source operating systems. They are designed in a democratic way. BSD seems to be the parliamentary system of design, USA i think is more like Linux in design (i guess MKLinux as stated earlier) where there's a president which is like Linus, likes to veto only when necessary and voices his opinion on what bills or code gets into the government. We have kernel maintainers in charge of their own subsystems which are like the supreme court, making sure that new laws are in accordance with the original design. yeah that's where the analogy breaks down. 

If I can come up with more examples, I'll post them.