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The End of Unix?
Unix may never become big on the desktop, but that battle is still being fought and it probably won't be over for a few years. However we shouldn't forget where the large strength of Unix lies: the network. Unix -runs- the Internet. I don't think any other Operating System can say that. The Internet started on Unix, the Internet was built on Unix and unless something better comes along (and that implies that we don't have "better" yet) the Internet will die running Unix.
Of course Unix, like any other modern OS, must change over time to accommodate new technologies and methodologies, but I see Unix being more able to adapt in todays fast changing Information Technology world than other operating systems based on monolithic kernels.
What do you think? Am I missing something? Is there a Unix killer in the works that I might have missed?
The Unix of today is very different from the Unix first produced in the 1970s. All things either evolve or die. Unix will evolve in some way or another. Just like mainframes, Unix popularity might wan (I think it already did) but it will come back (I think it already is, as Linux and FreeBSD).
Look at it this way Be *had* to put a level of Unix compatibility in BeOS. MacOS is now a variant of Unix and NT evolves more toward Unix every day.
On the other hand Unix/Linux must be lost to the user in the sense that Unix/Linux at the command line or Xlib level just isn't for the user.
EROS is hard to describe. It's capability-based and has orthogonal persistence -- and if that doesn't mean anything to you, I'm not going to be able to explain it much better. Check out the EROS project site and read the documentation. One thing this means that I can explain, though, is this: "snapshots" are taken of the current state of the system every five minutes. If the power goes out, the system is later restored to the last good snapshot. So you could have a text editor window open, never save your file, PULL THE PLUG on your computer and then plug it back it. Within 30 seconds (or however long your BIOS POST takes to complete), your text editor window is back on the screen, and you've lost no more than five minutes of work.
EROS is cool. I think it has potential to be the Next Big Thing. Check it out, download it (it's GPL'ed), play with it. Have fun.
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Fire has lived well beyond the era in which it was born (the era of stone) and has survived and thrived in the era of bronze, but now, many people believe that soon we will see the transition from that era into the age of iron. In that case, has the Slashdot community at large ever considered what the future is? Will Fire finally die off, will it adapt as it did before, or will Fire find a way to remain the same trustworthy system it always has been? And if Fire will come to an end, what does the Slashdot community feel will be its succesor?
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I don't know what will become of Unix, and whoever says they do is not only a fool but a liar as well.
It was only a few years ago that I was mourning the apparent *nix recession; The only game in town was Xenix/AT&T (and a wee bit of Sun, but not in my neck of the woods), and their products were both languishing and confined to minis.. Linux and the *BSDs were infant, not worth a mention outside of academia. Now it has come full circle. People are using *nix [gasp] ON THEIR DESKTOP! I can run *nix on everything from my multi-million dollar IBM to my $100 garage sale throwaway. And it is adapting again. Embedded Unix? I would have laughed my ass off if someone had suggested running Unix on a microcontroller only a few years ago..
I kind of suspect that *nix is just too adaptable to die, but to say whether or not it will be beaten back onto the mainframes by PalmOS run-PDA's in a decade is impossible.
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The advent of distributed, collaborative, pure-hype^H^H^H^Hjava, Active System Blaster 2000 will not make Unix obsolete. Even a revolutionary, fully distributed and autonomous network object system still needs to send bytes over the wire, still needs to access system memory, and still needs to accept input and create output. These are the things that Unix provides. This is why Unix will always be around.
I suppose that a newer operating system could supplant Unix. However, I don't seen any in the near future. Be has a bright future, because it has networking and other nice capabilities. But Unix has the trump card over BeOS: the idea of users. In a distributed network environment, the user concept becomes much more important. Information, files, interface configuration, and many other things are associated with a person. Those things must be secured from other people, and the other people must be secured from them. Therefore any OS that wishes to supplant Unix will need to supply the same kind of protection for users' information.
Cheers,
jwb
That's funny, I thought that Unix was based on a monolithic kernel... silly semantics
I would love to see some of the best coders and operating systems people put together a new OS from scratch using the latest techniques. Ideally this would create an ultra stable and very modular system. I would happily give up some extra CPU cycles for increased modularity and the ability to easily swap in and out OS components so that I could customize my OS to the task at hand. I find it rather ridiculous that I run the same OS when I am playing games, running a web server or working with Photoshop (etc). Rather than having a generically-good OS I would prefer a highly optimized OS for the task(s) at hand.
How often do I run run a game, Photoshop, compiler, and web server concurrently on my home box? Give me adaptibility and modularity or give me death!
Complexity Happens
Unix is not a product, it is a set of evolving ideas. As such, it is not going anywhere but up.
It's just as easy to ask: Is this the end of silverware, or the end of fire, or the end of any old thing that's proven to work... Is genetic engineering the end of agriculture? Is organ transplantation the end of death? Is The Bomb the end of War?
Yeah, there's micro-kernel based OSes out there like Qnx and NeXT, and Hurd... But they're still Unix. The NEW OS X from Apple is more Unix than it's predecessor. NT is more Unix than Win95.. There's new approaches like BeOS.
If one defines Unix in a very constrained way then Unix has been dead for a long time. When AT&T first released System V, and allowed it to mutate, Unix died and was reborn in a variety of ways. Umm, that was what? 1976?
If one defines Unix broadly, as a set of concepts, a layered architecture, levels of abstraction, sets of small uni-purpose tools working together, APIs and things 'grep-like' then guess what? Unix will live forever.
It's a pointless question, not because it's bad, but because it's completely subjective.
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Unix is too broad a family of systems to "die". It's not like AmigaDOS, or VMS, where there's just one Unix and it can "fall behind". Unix will be replaced, but it'll be replaced by more Unix.
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I have seen the future. The future is filled with operating systems that demand that their system binary directories be writable to all, else they fail.
I have seen the future. It has an operating system whose applications, even those written by the OS authors, can ignore the TEMP environment variable and scribble temporary files where-ever they want and fail to operate if they can not do as they wish.
I have seen the future. The future is filled with continued support for legacy drive letters and 8.3 file names with rename.ini kludges during installs.
I have seen the future. The future is an operating system where you have to shell out serious dollars to buy third-party utilities to get around security deficiences in the design of the OS. After all, why fix that pesky virus problem when so many anti-virus companies would go under without that revenue stream coming in.
I have seen the future. It has operating systems whose file systems don't support the concept of being able to delete a file yet have it not actually get deleted until the last remaining process that has it open dies first. For doing so would prevent the need to put dynamic link libraries into a temporary space and have them "installed" during a reboot. Reboots are good. They clear up sloppy OS design problems.
I have seen the future. The future is filled with grand marketing schemes like "Administration Kits" that promise all kinds of abilities to deploy corporate policy restrictions to users yet neglect to mention that these policies are applied by a program that has to write to an area of the OS that was previously recommended be R/O due to the security problems it causes if it is R/W, hence making the ability to make the scheme work as advertised impossible for all users who do not have full permissions to their workstation.
The future, my friends, is about image and not function. UNIX is ugly. It's doomed.
Or in other words, resistance is futile. At least that is what they want us to believe... :)
There's no reason to "convert" most of our existing Internet/networking infrastructure to anything else in the forseeable future. I agree with the prediction that things will end up moving more towards centralized computer resources, and lesser-equipped but ubiquitous terminals to access those resources, but Unix will still be there in some fashion.
Who's to say Unix won't be the OS that drives the appliances?