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The Future of Commerical Unices?
An anonymous reader asks: "I was recently wondering about the state of the commercial Unix world and what their plans are for the coming releases. I know Sun just released Solaris9 and HP is killing Tru64. But what about others like IRIX, HP-UX, SCO, etc? How has the rise of Linux affected these companies plans?"
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and be very opinionated and biased - but hey, it is an opinion question.
I think Solaris will be the only commercial unix to survive more than a few short years from now (here I define survive as being useful, current and having a decent market share and attracting new users - technically Netware still survives today, but it hardly meets my definition, it's just slowly dying off as legacy users switch away).
That being said, I don't think Solaris has much of a future either if they don't change their ways soon. They've already been trounced for web and application servers by thin cheap commodity linux stuff. They're only real foothold at the moment is large databases (think E10K-E15K class machines, 20TB databases, etc), and highly available databases at that.
They're currently in the process of losing this to Oracle9's RAC linux clusters, which blow Sun away in terms of bang for the buck, and can scale just as well in overall bang and reliability.
Now - all of the above is from the perspective of someone who believes only in the technical data and is willing to be on the slightly bleeding edge. When you factor in typical corporate environments/attitudes and whatnot, the picture slows down and pushes off into the future a bit further for the mainstream unix consumers.
None the less, I think my assessment here will prove to be accurate over time, with all commercial unices eventually falling to Linux, with Sun being the longest and strongest holdout.
Of course, in this long term sense, I really mean "the idea of Linux" when I say Linux. Linux could be supplanted by some other GPL (or GPL-ish) kernel down the line that re-uses a lot of the drivers and OS componentry from Linux and not really change my point.
And for one final caveat, since I can't really see the future, I don't know for sure that Sun won't manage to correct their currently tragic course and get back in shape and survive. If they were smart, they'd stop trying to marginalize linux as a thin edge device, and start contributing large amounts of their man-hours to perfecting linux on the sparc64 platform as a way of protecting their hardware and support businesses against the demise of Solaris.
11*43+456^2
I talk to a lot of old school Unix guys (who prefer Solaris for it's Unix pureness). They seem to agree that the desktop isn't important. I think they're wrong here though. The future of any Unix is tied to the desktop.
Microsoft first controlled the desktop operating system. Then, they used the desktop operating system to control desktop applications. Then they used desktop applications to control network services/mid-level servers. (Outlook/Exchange, IE/IIS). Now, they are trying to strengthen their hold on mid-level servers and break into the high-level applications department. (Not through high-level servers but a bunch of mid-level ones).
They may or may not ever get the high-level servers, but I think if history proves anything, they will eventually. Not because they have a better product, but because they are able to use existing dominations to leverage into new markets.
Therefore, unless Unix makes headway on the desktop, there's no way they'll servive as servers. This is why there is hope in Linux as a desktop. Without it, Unix will eventually die.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Phuuh.. Because it doesn't run X11 as default you say it is not a unix! How did a windowing system suddenly become unix?
Technically when you're talking about unix you're referring to a trademarked owned by Open Group but practically we mean posix compliance and os x does a pretty decent job at this.
It doesn't matter if it runs by a means of a sledgehammer as an output device and a chess table as an input device as long as it otherwise conforms to posix specification (api, shell, utilities) you can for all practical purposes call it a unix..
Most periperals, heck, most motherboards and cpus, are becoming "disposable" in the cost equation.
Besides, if you want support, you're always free to either: (a) add it yourself or (b) pay / bribe / cajole someone else to add it. This IS one of the benefits of open source, after all.