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IBM Kills project Monterey
I just got this news - IBM is killing project Monterey. Full story can be found on this page at ZDNET (Smart Partner). This is a bit surprising (if I may call it like this).
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I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.
Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
'But, madam, is thre nothing else
That we can show today?
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Anonymous Emily Dickinson LIVES!
First ZDNet has their writers make up FUD (that guy whatever his name was writing about Bugtraq's vulnerabilities counts for Linux and NT) to get impressions.
Now they're paying Slashdot to write up an article that has so little information that you're forced to click through to ZDNet!
Nope. That's owned by X/Open aka "The Open Group"
Caldera does get the source to Unixware & SCO Unix, I think.
The second rule of project Monterey is, do not talk about project Monterey.
The third rule is that you will use Project Monterey on your first night.
But seriously, Project Monterey was IBM's attempt to corner the cheese market.
Nothing in the FREAKING ARTICLE described exactly what Monterey was. Thanks to the guy you just flamed, I now know. Good job.
hm
anyways, its going to really piss off VERITAS
whee -Me
Actually in all likelihood Linux already runs on O3k. Certainly it does already run on O2k. Forget Itanium, these machines are available today with MIPS CPUs, which are arguably better than anything Intel's going to produce anyway.
You are correct.
Tru64 was Digital Unix was OSF/1. Ultrix for VAX and MIPS was also BSD based.
As I recall, DEC wanted to have input into the AT&T/Sun Unix project but AT&T was pretty eager to regain some control of Unix now that its anti-trust was settled and rejected outside input (Or so the story goes at DEC, I was working for DEC at the time).
DEC and HP were very small companies compared to AT&T, heck HP was smaller than DEC back then, so you can imagine that this made them nervous.
The OSF project initially planned to use Ultrix as its base for the OSF 1 standard but then giant IBM joined up and OSF switched to AIX.
I remember everyone saying 'AIX, what the heck is AIX?'
There were some calls for AT&T to just join OSF and solve the problem but that never happened.
In the end no unified Unix emerged from either camp and DEC produced OSF/1 based on BSD and MACH 2.5.
Sun switched from the BSD based SunOS to Solaris, IBM continued to develop AIX and HP went with HP-UX.
AT&T did nothing of note as a developer but they bought a TON of VAX Ultrix machines helping make DEC the largest Unix vendor in the world at that time (go figure).
NOTE: I was a young DECie at the time so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.
Heck, your reading this on Slashdot, you should do that regardless.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
It's great reading all the armchair analysts here on Slashdot.
SCO is not Monterey. Monterey is not SCO. Caldera purchased the server division and the professional services division. In all of this, Monterey was but a tile in the SCO mosaic. A small one at that.
Exactly how Caldera is being dragged into this announcement is beyond me. It's like saying Red Hat is clueless because LinuxCare had to lay people off.
Um, IBM is a Caldera business partner. They didn't lose anything when the merger was announced. IBM and Caldera actually work closely together.
The Monterey decision must not have been linked to the SCO/Caldera merger. There must have been other criteria behind the decision.
i guess the same could be said about compaq vs sun.
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montery didn't fail it was the project name. They rebranded it AIX/L so says I who just went to the IBM e-commerce conference.
Vermifax
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Anyone else think the AIX/L logo is silly. For those who haven't seen it it is the letters aix in blue with a blue curve over the top leading towards the L.
Vermifax
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They are rebranding the AIX kernel (it's Aix L with a blue swoosh over it) It will be system call compatable with linux.(Read very little to no rewritting of code) I expect there will be hickups hence the "little"
Vermifax
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And they are making AIX system call compatable with linux. I highly doubt the will open up any AIX kernel code.
Vermifax
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It costs a lot of money to develop monterey, or AIX, or any operating system. By embracing Linux, they can lay all their pampered OS developers off. Not to worry too much about them, though, because the demand for competent (and I would say that AIX/Monterey has some very competent programmers) is very high.
Well, I'd say you're probably right about commercial Unicies getting folded into Linux. It's simple economics.
Neither SGI nor IBM make money off their Unicies, the make money off the harware the Unicies run on. So why not bootstrap Linux to the point where you can replace Irix and AIX with an OS other people will contribute to maintaining?
Steven E. Ehrbar
OSF's stated purpose was to unify Unix against Solaris/SysV. The reality was to pay lip service to unification and protect AIX, HP-UX and Digital Unix against Sun and AT&T. Unix unification never happened of course, but it's only now with Linux forcing a de facto Unix standard that the Unix family is finally coming together.
Steven
Monterey is dead. The press releases are just trying to put the best face possible on the situation. Monterey's best bits are simply being incorporated into the next generation of AIX.
Why? Because with the tidal wave of Linux, especially 64-bit Linux, there was no real point in developing another 64-bit Unix.
It's that simple.
Steven
How much did Caldera's buy have to do with it?
Next to nothing. This has been coming together for some time.
Steven
Glad I got the attention of an OpenServer expert of sorts...
The problem I see is that if creating a SCO System Services Emulation Layer was easy, SCO themselves would have done it for UnixWare. It can't be any easier on Linux, and frankly, I can't expect Caldera to care that much about OpenServer customers except to milk them for whatever possible.
I guess I'm skeptical about SCO's great "VAR Channel". As far as I can tell, it's a bunch of vertical market apps that are in legacy mode to the extent that the vendors can't/won't port them to anything up-to-date. Which is fine as a 'legacy' revenue channel, but totally a non-issue for the further expansion of Linux or Unixware. What Caldera got in UnixWare is an underpromoted, full-fledged OS which they can push to Unix-friendly x86-friendly Linux shops.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
IBM puts up with, and makes an enormous amount of money of Windows NT/2000 in services. Much more then they make off of Linux right now.
All in all, they'd rather have RedHat get their small cut rather than Microsoft, just as long as they get to move their hardware and services. Plus Linux+Netfinity gets them at a portion of Sun's market that AIX+RS/6000 doesn't.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It really is true, isn't it? That *BSD is the real operating system and that Linux is just for the anyone but microsoft crowd, eh?
Really, why should anyone be rooting the demise of an operating system? It could have been promising, being that it was based on such (finer than Linux) other operating systems. It's nt like you said "too bad, we could have learned a lot afrom them" but "whoop, whoop, whoop".
Even in Linus' interview where he freely admits that linux has faults, even when compared to Windows xxxx. If you want linux to thrive you need to work on it, not just gloat about another OS's shortcomings.
How do you figure that? Montery was an experiment. It failed. AIX, (unrelated) like Solaris, currently scales far and above anything that Linux can hope to achieve.
You need to understand. For linux to have a chance (of corporate acceptance, since that's what you seem to be insinuating here) in the long term, it needs (and that means the developers, distributors and users) to realize that Unix is on it's side. A "win" for Linux by taking something that AIX or SCO had means nothing. You need to stop being concerned with other Unixes and go after the big cheese that you *REALLY* want to target. Windows. Because no matter how you stack things, ANY other unix beats the pant's off of Linux, depending on the situation...
It ran beautifully in San Jose at LWCE
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
I heard cynical engineers within HP at the time refer to it as the 'Open Mouth Foundation'.
Just doing my pedantic part.
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Index of Alternative Operating Systems
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#include
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("hello world\n");
return 0;
}
cpeterso
(or was that 5L, as it said in the end of the artical)
So, is IBM going to go all out open-source? I doubt they could get such a deep integration with linux as their talking about without either rewriting it, or GPLing their software. The artical wasn't very clear on their plans.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
He understood it perfectly: it's great for frying chickens and electrocuting criminals. Where would the great state of Florida be without his contribution to the art of senseless destruction of human life?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I just got back from the IBM Tech Conference in Vegas... I wondered why they weren't giving away Monterey T-shirts this year.
I guess the one I have from last year is now an official Collector's Item....
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus.
Exactly. If you read the linked article, you'd find out that for a time Intel intended on marketing the i860 as a main CPU, and using it to take on the established RISC-Unix server/workstation market. However, after much hype, the final product performed quite poorly, and the chip had to tone its ambitions down to use as a lowly math co-processor.
Anyone remember Intel late unlamented 432? The things with Itanium sound awfully familiar...
Or the i860.
Anyone remember Intel late unlamented 432? The things with Itanium sound awfully familiar...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"OK, just what exactly is this talking about: specifically, are they going to, say, buy a copy of Red Hat, change some strings, add some apps, and call it "AIX RL"? Are they "rebranding" the Linux kernel? Are they calling their linux distro AIX RL? I'm confused here, but its been a long day. "
Sorry but linux isn't quite ready to take over for AIX yet, for example it can't scale nearly as far (SMP wise). So IBM is going to try to at first emulate linux under AIX and then later merge the codebases to take the best features from both.
I'm still waiting for one that's insightful and demonstrates that the poster has read the article.
Errr... i was way off... it was to port AIX to IA-64... oops...
Mark Duell
Where did you get the idea that OSF-1 was based on BSD code?
From what I remember, OSF-1 was based the Mach Microkernel with an old version of AIX (SysV derived, but older than the SysV that Sun/AT&T were pushing) providing the Unix elements.
-Jordan Henderson
Yes, the later Alliant systems (FX2800) were also based off of this chip. They were extremely fast, but nearly imp[ossible to write good compilers for. The instruction pipeline had a push architecture, whereby you had to actually feed an instruction in to get one out. It was very hard to keep the pipeline fed and thus very hard to realize maximum performance IIRC. I thought that SGI may have also used them in some of the original Reality Engine graphics as the geometry processor, possibly because you could keep the pipe fed with matrice operations if you handcoded it right, but I'm really vague on that one....
Expensive, yes, but if I need that kind of scalability and performance now, then I probably won't be able to afford to wait until 2001 or thereabouts until the buggers are out. Then again, unfortunately for SGI, we're an all-Sun shop (for better or for worse), so we'll be dealing with the E10k's for quite a while yet.
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Which SCO holds a controlling interest in.
Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
<p>
Ever heard of a company called BSDi? <sarcasm>They are the makers of BSD/OS, which (surprise!)contains BSD code.</sarcasm> SVR4 does contain BSD code. It merged in some 4.3BSD(check me on the exact release here, TAHOE/RENO) with the AT&T source tree. Think back to the BSDI/AT&T lawsuits.
I think he might have been mistaken with OSF/1's slight BSD config style.
ok so does anyone even know what this "Project Monterey" is that IBM is ending? a little more info would be nice
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
Itanium is in fact yielding ok, but the extraordinarily complex compilers needed for EPIC are currently producing such slow code that Intel needs to pretend they can't make the chips to save face.
Actually, Intel recently bought the vendor of a very nice compiler set, KAI. I'm wondering if part of their purchuse desision was based on the fact that they might be able to write a compiler for it that actually worked. (Obviously I have no way of knowing, just some off-topic speculation).
McKinley will probably be able to compete on a performance basis with Sun's US3, and maybe even IBM's Power4. (The Alpha 21364 will cream it, but what else is new?)
I wonder how Sledgehammer will compare? I doubt it could match performance, but OTOH, if it can do (for example) 1/2 as fast as a Power4 at 1/4 of the cost, it's still pretty good. (BTW, you know anything about release dates for the 364? Haven't heard anything about that for a long time.)
Nothing Herr Jobs "invented" was not already present in the wonderful implementation of Xenix on TRS-80 model 12 and 16 hardware. Simply fantastic, just because people are too snooty to go down to Radio Shack to by their corporate systems, did Xenix slowly perish. Otherwise you linux script-kiddies would all be Xenix JCL-kiddies and the Zilog Corporation would currently be rulling the entire known world. And I would be sitting fat on all my Zilog Stock, you bastards!!!!!!!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Sounds exactly like their current strategy for Linux. No wonder it got the ax.
Expert is the wrong term, although I do have some SCO certs as well as some IBM AIX and HP/UX certs in my file. They come in handy at re-negotiation time.
I agree that slapping a compatability layer on Linux isn't going to be easy, by the way, but in order to get the legacy users to upgrade into their product line, Caldera needs to think about it.
The trick question here is, what did Caldera really get in this deal? As I see it, UnixWare is pointless. It's not a direct upgrade for legacy OpenServer, so marginal sales there. Solaris for x86 is squeezing from the top and Linux et al [is|are] squeezing from the bottom. Caldera got the name and a nice OS, but no market to speak of.
The resellers frankly represent a whole business model was outdated years ago. I hate to sound negative here, but I think Caldera has made a mistake. I hope it isn't fatal...
I doubt, however, that the brains at Caldera would have made this move if there wasn't something of value left in SCO...perhaps we just don't see it yet?
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
While you're correct that MVS (OS/390) and whatever-the-old-name-of-the-OS-for-AS400s-was (OS/400)are going to be with us for some time, IBM does appear to be taking Linux seriously in that they've gotten it to run on the S/390 and AS/400 platforms, and what this release does is position it in their current moneymaker arena, the AIX server.
The upward-compatability is really nice for a growing company, though. "If we buy an RS/6000 43P, we can upgrade to an S/80, and then to an AS/400, and run it all on AIX/Linux". Linux becomes basically their hardware abstraction layer, which is, you must admit, a slick trick.
The others will be supported, but let's face it, most of what's really running on OS/390 is older code, and when the rewrite comes, being able to plunk cheap developers down in front of dirt cheap Linux beige boxes instead of more specialized MVS developers on terminals has a big cost advantage.
I'm not saying it's IBM's brightest move, but it does make a certain calculating sense, and it can't really hurt more than some of their other blunders. (OS/2 Warp edition?)
Meow.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Sun themselves are quite happy - but I don't think they will stay at No 1 in the Unix shipping stakes - after MacOSX in Jan 01. Slainte Trull
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
WP 5.2 and 8 still work for me.
Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
/stand (in fact the whole fs layout feels SysV-ish); BSD-ish flags to commands like ps(1) are listed under "compatibility syntax" whereas the SysV-ish flags are considered default; no such thing as pagedaemon; etc.
That's funny, because Digital UNIX doesn't feel BSD-ish at all: SysV startup, with runlevels and all; PID 1 is init(8); no
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
Wasn't Ultrix based on (some release of) BSD?
oooh wrong again , it was ibm + few others try at creating unified commercial unix on ia64/powerPC. this commercial unix was primarily targeted at sun who is right now dominating mid-server market with solaris.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
IBM can't do that unless it decides to relicense AIX to the GPL, which, considering how many different copyright notices are in the startup screens, I see happenning when hell freezes over.
Instead, IBM will have a Linux compatibility layer on top of AIX. Basically, it will still be AIX, but with the added benefit of being able to compile Linux sources.
The only real news here is that a new version of AIX has been announced. This new AIX will also run on IA-64. The goal of the Monterey project was to create a UNIX(r) for IA-64, but since IBM accomplished this with AIX, they decided to kill the project.
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NO CARRIER
OSF was supposed to use the Mach microkernel, but OSF/1 (the only commercially released adaptation of OSF) never really used it (though DEC's marketing would have you belive otherwise). You're confusing OSF (the specification) with OSF/1 (an implementation).
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Yeah, Ultrix was also DEC's, and was replaced by OSF/1 when DEC moved from MIPS to Alpha.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Monterey was the joint effort of IBM, SCO, and two others to port a high-end, enterprise class unix to Itanium (IA-64). The excitement driving the buzz was that Monterey looked like the migration path for AIX.
Looks like Linux inherits all that buzz.
Whoop
whoop
whoop
Eliminating the need for portable software is a good thing? Come on. In a Linux-only scenario, where's the advantage over a Windows-only scenario? Sure, not having to pay to Microsoft, but is that really all that remains of all those dreams of freedom? Sad indeed.
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This means IBM will use LInux over AIX for it's future unix growth --- Sun must be scared...and the SCO carcass is being picked clean 8)
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
i guess i'll be the one to clue you in: linux kernels are already broken into SMP and non-SMP versions. The single -processor kernels dont need to have any of the overhead
Really? So that's what it is. One less project for Itanium...
This will only benefit AMD's new Sledgehammer! =)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
JFS is the big thing IBM is handing to RedHat in the hopes that Linux can begin to compete on a closer to enterprise level.
IBM doesn't have much to worry about from linux cutting into their AIX sales, since AIX is primarily run on IBM hardware anyhow...and linux is being marketed towards machines AIX never ran on. The S/390 port had nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with hardware, since mainframe sales have been flagging for a long time and they think this might breathe new life into the line...hell, they might even be right.
64-bit processor I understand (the memory and I/O bus are 64 bits, right?). What makes a 64-bit OS so drastically different from a 32-bit OS?
AIX (for the benefit of those who may not know AIX is IBM's flavor of Unix) is doing pretty well actually since it ships with all of their RS/6000 servers (which have been getting a larger chunk of the market since the introduction of the S80 and HA70 models), but I'm sure that IBM has realized that with the huge interest and potential that Linux has it would better serve their interests to integrate with Linux than come up with this half-baked Monterey nonsense. I never understood why IBM was going in this direction (Monterey) anyways, given that some of the Linux development teams were stating that they would probably have the first OS available for the Itanium at least 6 mos ago. Plus by making a relatively common codebase and ease-of-recompile for Linux apps onto AIX, IBM will be getting a lot of applications ready-made that they can point out to potential customers. Hell, I can't wait to be able to run some of the Linux apps on our RS/6000 server farm. Another happy announcement from Big Blue from my perspective!
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Errrr.... and OS/390 & OS/400. They're not going anywhere anytime soon, especially considering how entrenched in corporate datacenters they are. At the company I work for we run Lotus Notes on OS/390 (4000+ users on one S/390 server with two Lotus Notes server instances) vs. approx 300 users on AIX (on an RS/6000 SP/2 node). OS/390 is a pretty big workhorse that many companies rely on heavily, although the situation is changing with the hardware improvements that have come on the other hardware platforms.
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And IBM is incorporating the NUMA technology it acquired when it bought Sequent into it's server lines. The new server will be called Regatta, with two 1GHz + CPU's strapped together in a single chip. CNET has a couple of good articles about this here and here
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You really could see this comming. With Caldera buying bits of SCO IBM has lost their partner in Monterey and it makes little sense for them to create another UNIX by themselves. They've already got AIX and as partners in the Trillian project they'll have a Linux IA-64 solution as well. IBM's complete adoption of Linux may have killed this project regardless of SCO's sale, but I suspect that was the final nail in the coffin.
Don't forget that Digital Equipment Corp was once the 2nd largest computer company in the world and Compaq was a tiny little startup that built PC's that nobody would seriously consider in a corporate environment. Compaq was the very first of the PC vendors to become a Tier 1 provider. Whether they know how to beat Sun is debatable, but they have proven they can beat giants before. Digital's mistakes are legendary (mostly the continuous waffling other whether to support Vax or UNIX and not enough resources to do both), but it appears that Sun may be headed down that same road (Free Solaris for $99, use Linux at the low end, migrate to Solaris at the high end). If IBM migrates high end AIX features to Linux, AIX will probably disappear (this announcement hints at that already). Then Linux WILL be able to compete with Solaris on the big boxes and what does Sun do with competing OSes? Sure, it's a big if, but every indication is that IBM is firmly on that trail, hoping Linux is the key to their return to market dominance.
Having said that, our PPC-based Linux brethren have often pointed out that binary only software distributions are the bane of their existence since they almost always run only on Intel, so we need to ensure we watch the commercial entities in that regard.
Perhaps a Borg-ified Tux? Seems appropriate, since it just assimilated one OS and has its sights on others...
its IBM who should be worried about Sun virtually locking up the midrange
Hah, the AS/400 is an infinitely better machine. First, aside from the 'e' series, which has that nasty looking red panel on the front, the AS/400 looks much nicer. Secondly, OS/400 is far superior to Solaris. Third, the AS/400 is much more expandable than any Sun box. Fourth, IBM can do pretty much whatever they please to the underlying processor architecture, and user programs still run just fine. (They did it back in the early or mid 90s, so I expect they'll do it again). And, on top of all that, they're not all that expensive, either. One more thing. They just _DO NOT_ crash. Well, unless the IBM-supplied UPS goes on the fritz and starts giving it bad power, but then IBM comes out and fixes it for you (you did buy the service contract, right?) and replaces the UPS under warranty, and it's back to just not crashing, EVER. Mmmm, can you tell that I want an AS/400 in my living room? Maybe I should go dig up the '92 model and bring it home. Now if they'd ever finish the Linux port...
-Nathan
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Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Monterey was supposed to be an Unix for the Itanium. If they get rid of that, what is there left to run on the Itanium besides the Linux and the 64 bit Windows? If there is nothing else then Intel would have to seriously back Linux or else risk giving the upper hand to Microsoft should Windows become the sole OS on the Itanium!
Maybe you've never heard of a company called SGI. They're down right now, but not necessarily out. Their new Orign 3000 server line uses a cc:NUMA architecure. They hope to run Linux on these someday, but Intel has been jerking them around with Itanium delays.
I suspect that Cray is also using cc:NUMA technology (which they got from SGI) in their next computer, the SV2.
Hmm....alot of people making cracks about IBM and cheese appear to be anonymous cowards... Reveal your true identity and unite, young cheeseheads!
--- What
Kernel 2.2 doesn't scale up processors very well...... 2.4 will do it just fine.
If, however, they keep multiple kernels that are optimized for specific types of functionality, ie. SMP or single CPU'd systems, or other specific hardware, then the kernel should not loose its efficency if and only if they common core components are as efficient as they can be.
Digital Bowlby - The Audience Isn't Listening.
As for using the Linux kernel, IBM will be using the Linux kernel from top to bottom across all major product lines. IBM views Linux as the key strategic operating systems technology for its future.
... and another one bites the dust.
This is great news. If you read the article you can see that Linux and AIX are the cornerstones of the new IBM. The article says that it is IBM's intention to run Linux everywhere, from mainframes, to minis, to workstations, to PDAs. AIX RL 5.1 will be a version of AIX morphed with Linux.
Good work, IBM.
I beg to differ, sir..
Monterey was a co-operative porject of IBM, SCO, and sequent..
Now - all the monterey project goes to the next version of AIX..
So where do you see the Monterey project alive?
Hetz (Heunique)
I think you are wrong about WinNT 64 being "nowhere in sight." I saw it running in July at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. It may not be ready for release, but it looked like it was at least beta quality. They should have no problem getting it released by the time Itanium ships.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, their other big cash cow, MS Office, is also soon to become a commodity. It might take a few years, but Linux and the Gnome Foundation are looking to cut off Microsoft's air supply completely. A Free, cross-platform, component-based, office suite is soon going to be available, and Microsoft is going to suffer. The fact that Microsoft has become addicted to astronomical profit margins and a constant increase in their stock price will only exacerbate the problem. They can't let go of either Windows or MS Office (because it would affect their revenue too much in the short term), and yet they aren't going to be able to compete with capable free software products forever (especially at their current price structure).
In the end it is going to be practically impossible to make money selling commodity software. But that's OK, software will still get written, it simply will be written by hardware or service based "solution providers."
IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus. SGI had a high end graphics board that used 12 i860s for doing the 3D transformations. Whether they still use them or not, I don't know.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Possibly the editors are aiming for maximum bottom-feeder no-think-just-post reactions (more comments, more banner views, yes?). The title you gave your submission just didn't have that. "IBM Kills Monterey" seemingly does.
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"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
WinNT64 isn't "nowhere in sight." It runs, albeit slowly and really flaky. Hopefully Linux runs better than it (no experience there) but with Itanium getting closer to shipping, the landscape is looking pretty bare for operating systems.
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux.
:-)
Monterey died with the SCO sale, I suspect. There's been much hype, but I haven't read of anyone seeing a preview release. Oh well! I guess that's vaporware!
Linux will run on Itanium, and 64 bit to boot. Though I bet with a bunch of bugs. For example, Alphalinux is just a mess on SMP EV6 systems. I've seen it crash horribly on 4 CPU ES40s while performing NFS ops; looks like some sort of cross CPU spin lock contention which leads to deadlock. Yuk. But I bet it'll be fine on single CPU Itanium systems. And Linux is ubiquitous, which even at hype Monterey lacked. Plus, I suspect that between 2.4 and 2.6 we'll get the enterprise features we expect from commercial UNIX running properly on Linux; I want: decent NFS support, a functional automounter, pervasive threading throughout common system libraries and applications, a display server which supports antialiasing (actually a better display model would help -- how about "display postscript"?), and a logical volume manager... that would help.
You could probably look forward to NetBSD/OpenBSD porting to Itanium soon after release. And after that expect Sun to chime in with Solaris. But, like Solaris/Intel, I'm sure it will be a pale imitation.
Yup, that's true. The popular jab at the time was that OSF really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever."
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SCO had a lot of VAR contacts. VAR is a big part of Caldera's strategy.
:-)
Note that with all of the bad blood SCO had in the Linux community there is no way that SCO could push Linux to that channel. Caldera can.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You mean SCO 'owns a controlling interest' in The Open Group? I'd be astonished if this were true - the Open Group is an industry consortium, and no single vendor would be allowed to 'own' it, let alone dominate it.
The Open Group owns the Unix brandname, i.e. if you pass its conformance tests you get to call your product Unix.
By all means get pedantic, but get accurate as well :)
* S/390 = System/390 = the hardware architecture for current mainframes
* LPAR = hardware partitioning for S/390, can run multiple OSs within these partitions rather as with VM/390.
* OS/390 = Operating System/390 = the OS formerly known as MVS, runs most mainframe sites. Interestingly, it has a complete Unix API built in (not a separate mode), albeit in EBCDIC not ASCII.
* VM/390 = Virtual Machine/390 = the virtual machine hypervisor that can run many different OSs at once, including OS/390, CMS (single user OS, runs in a whole VM dedicated to one user, quite nice to use), and of coures Linux.
OK, that's enough pedantry... I'm not a real mainframe person, I just used to run Unix on an Amdahl mainframe once.
I thought this was OSF/1 based? At one time DEC called it DEC OSF/1 I think. The earlier DEC Ultrix was BSD based, though.
> Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
:)
I'm guessing BSDi is also based on BSD too
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Wouldn't this be a logical thing since SCO is now owned by Caldera? Why would caldera continue to fund the further development of another UNIX variant, along with IBM who is fully behind Linux now too? It would just be rather odd that two Linux centric companies would together develop another OS to compete with themselves...
This is doubly a good thing for Linux.
A) Its one less competitor, and it looks like IBM will be pushing Linux (and AIX) instead.
B) Depending on how the implemetations of Trillian and the Linux on 64 bit AMD go, you may be able to very easily run code on either version of Linux, whereas Monterey would lock you into using Intel hardware.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
No, it should really read: IBM kills Dynix. IBM owns Sequent (them of the Dynix OS) and has been selling it pretty agressively as an enterprise platform (and it is a good one too). Well, Sequent has always used x86 processors --Monterey was supposed to unite AIX and Dynix, breathing life into the Sequent line post-IA64.
So basically they're killing Dynix (it was supposed to die) and substiting it with AIX RL (Linux). I.e. Linux is getting its first, official mainframe/micro line --yeah you can run it on RS/6000s, but you can also run plain AIX. In a coupla years you will *only* be able to run AIX RL on IA-64 Sequents...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE
Umm... HPUX.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I wonder how much Caldera's purchase of SCO had to do with this..
Remember, this was a joint venture with SCO.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
umm.. it is actually good. Monterey was an effort to create a unified(sco, ibm,...) unix platform(like we need one more) that would run on most popular server platforms(IA-32, IA-64 and Power). Now that they have linux(that already runs on these platforms) this is not necessary and the resources devoted to creating something that users would have to pay big bucks for can be directed to something more useful(such as linux development). There would have been serious overlap with Project Monterey and linux anyway so why compete against a huge open source movement when you can join it.
The goal of project monterey was to create a stable enterprise unix for an intel platform. This was accomplished in AIX for the IA-64 platform. I submitted this story a couple days ago as well
2000-08-14 16:42:51 AIX 5L for IA-64 (articles,ibm) (rejected)
but for some reason it got rejected...
Point well-made. However, if we want to get really pedantic, the system OS/390 is either an operating system or a platform, and VM is a meta-operating system (or operating sytem) that runs on system OS/390 and Linux runs under VM. :-) Gosh, these IBM folx are strange, but they do good stuff sometimes.
The fact that Sun is destroying IBM in the unix market has little to do with technical issues - the Sparc architecture itself is far behind. Its marketing pure and simple. Sun has a coherent end-to-end marketing story - Solaris on Sun Sparc hardware, IBM doesn't - they're beholden to too many platforms.
Expect each vendor in this group crowd to dump its proprietary unix. HP certainly will if it wants to revice its flagging unix-systems division - which in this quarter was only a fraction of HP's reported earnings. SGI pretty much already has adopted linux full-fledged (not sure if this, or SGI, even really matters), and IBM looks like they are on their way.
They really don't have a choice - Sun is as much of a threat to these vendors now as MS, and McNealy is going to be as much as a cut-throat as Gates about killing off the competition (who I garner he never really cared for anyway).
Fragmentation-for-features was only ever worthwhile when unix was being marketed strictly to brainy IT folks buying high-end equipment only. Now its entering the mainstream and marketing matters. The fragmented approach simply doesn't jive when you are trying to tell a coherent marketing story.
When do this strategy emerge? Every indication is that Sun is backing Solaris on Sparc as their single unified strategy.
As for Compaq, their only hope now is large corporate contracts. Dell has largely pushed them out of the direct/consumer market, and their recent stumbles have given consumers the impression that they are no longer a leader despite their size. As you know, the company has also had some extremely questionable financials in the last two years.
Take a look at Sun's market share and their stock price. They aren't too worried about linux just yet. In fact, its IBM who should be worried about Sun virtually locking up the midrange like Microsoft has the low end.
IBM killed it for the reason that it was too expensive to develop, they were the only ppl to support it, and Linux was more cross compatible. However, i wouldn't be suprised if they created their own linux distro instead, that would be packaged with their stuff. Somehow I don't think IBM will put up with having to use 'other people's operating systems'.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Whaaat? MacOS and NeXTStep before it were totally BSD...right from the beginning. BSD through and through.
In fact...Steve Jobs, the great visionary, "Edison of our times", _INVENTED_ BSD...HE CAME UP WITH THE WHOLE IDEA!!! IT WAS HIS _GENIUS_!!!
...and you WinTel bozos STOLE IT! Just like you STOLE everything else from Apple!
Curse you!
Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.
The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing!
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Project monterey was just a project to get AIX running on an intel architecture.
This project was a success, so now they will be integrating AIX and Linux. The AIX libraries and so forth will be compatible with the linux libraries, etc. This will allow programs that were written for linux to compile on AIX with little or no modification. This is a great thing for linux, and shows that big blue is standing behind linux.
Now, if we can just get them to support a few more distros....
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux. Now, while Linux will probably handle the lower-midrange end of the market pretty well, Solaris it ain't. Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE as enterprise level) to go along with it's enterprise level CPU, Intel is going to hit up against quite a barrier with it's already screwy Itanium project.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The Unix (TM) brand name
A nice, tree hugging logo
Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
It won't help Caldera
I was wondering when this would happen. We're just seeing the beginning of Linux displacing proprietary OS's. As a consultant friend of mine predicted 5 years ago, the commercial Unicies simply won't be able to keep up with the innovation and "heart and mind" support of a world wide effort.
Note to Microsoft: We're stealing a page out of your playbook. The software doesn't have to be good to be successful, it just has to be popular. We're doing one better though, we're also making good software in a good way and we've got the support of the people you tried to ignore. The CIO's are the wrong people to be pandering to!
Monterey was a good idea and it'll be even better when folded into Linux. Soon I predict that all of the best parts of all the commercial Unicies will be folded into Linux...
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* Education
* Integration
* Support
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Monterey was a consortium of IBM, SCO, NUMA-Q, and Intel to deliver an enterprise-grade unix for Itanium( aka, IA-64, Mercred).
An interesting bit was the cc:NUMA architecture for high end clustering. I wonder what will become of it?
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Honestly, is there anything left of SCO worth Caldera shelling out the money it paid?
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Like it or not, a lot of people are lining up behind Itanium and Intel is still the unquestioned emperor of the microprocessor market. They'll do fine without Monterey.
Monterey is very much alive. The only thing that is going on is that the RELEASE name is changing from Monterey/64 (on IA64) to AIX 5.0 (or AIX-L, with the "L" standing for the ability to run Linux IA64 binaries). SCO will probably ship "AIX 5" for IA64. It is NOT the case that IBM is going to be using the Linux kernel. One thing that was supposed to happen that might get dropped is support for UnixWare IA32 binaries on IA64.
This is not actually that surprising. IBM has a stated goal of making linux run on every piece of hardware and every platform they sell, from the top of the line (OS390) to the bottom (intel-based netfinity line, I guess).
So there are two things going on here: 1) IBM has their own version of Unix that's quite good but not doing very well in the marketplace. 2) IBM has decided that Linux is the way to unseat Sun's dominance of the midrange server market.
Given those two facts, supporting yet a different version of Unix designed primarily for the Itanium platform (regardless of what they say about also running on the Power chip) doesn't make any sense. Even IBM has limited resources.
Bullshit. The purpose of OSF was to unify against the looming threat of SunOS/AT&T SysV integration - it would do excatly the opposite of protecting "its members' respective proprietary OSes." Sun eventually parted ways with AT&T, and OSF withered. DEC was the only company to actually release OSF for its hardware. IBM and HP eventually went with a SysV strategy anyway; Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Monterey was the joint effort of IBM, SCO, and two others to port a high-end, enterprise class unix to Itanium (IA-64). The excitement driving the buzz was that Monterey looked like the migration path for AIX.
Looks like Linux inherits all that buzz.
GO TRILLIAN
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
I amazed that they even ever saw SCO as a viable partner - the corpse of SCO has been floating from door to door looking for some poor sucker to take it in and break it down for spare parts. Caldera finally was suckered. Ransom Love looked quite clueless telling the audience in San Jose that Linux alone couldn't do it - that somehow SCO's dead product line was needed to complete its promise to customers. What hooey. SCO will be like WordPerfect, a forgotten power that drifts from buyer to buyer. Caldera needs to realize that customers want to hear a coherent marketing story - having a linux company come out and tell people that linux is inadequate is not what I would call a compelling marketing story. This doesn't surprise me one bit - Caldera has never known one thing about marketing their own product (the "Business Linux"???? what the hell is that????).
Anyway, back to IBM. Its nice to see finally that the potential market for AIX on IA64 is likely too small to address as a strategic issue. Customers are tired of parallel product lines that somehow address high-end, midrange, low-end, in some bizarre drivel that never makes any sense. Look at Compaq's worthless unix marketing plan regarding Tru64 and Linux.
IBMs major problem has always been that it considers itself too big to commit to any one platform. This is why still to this day IBM has marketing issues. Look at Sun - they have one product line and one OS - a Sun customer always knows what end is up with that company and the Sun commitment is always coherent. This is why Sun is going to continue being the number one unix vendor, for better or for worse, even though IBM's product lineup is likely superior (just impossible to see in continuity).