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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?"
IBM seems the most likely (having publicly stated as fact, at least) to give up their commercial *nix in favor of Linux. But, as good as Linux is (and I have it everywhere), it still has maybe a decade to go to have the sort of stable lineage of the other commercial *nix products.
.NET... it's the price tag that will kill it.
That isn't to say it's less stable, exactly. It's just a matter of how many times vital features have been tested, added and changed. HP-UX, as an example, has a bright future. HP is integrating features from Tru64 (volume management, etc) to an already supremely stable platform.
By comparison, DG/UX (Data General) still has more advanced features (NUMA, NUMA, NUMA, etc and did I mention NUMA? HP doens't want to listen on that one), and development died on DG/UX years ago. But HP-UX soldiers on because of stability and compatibility with large installations. Heck, even the old K's are going for a premium now because some customers won't give them up.
I'd even suggest Solaris might be in the same boat. The install base is huge. The reliability is outstanding. Linux and BSD can compete, but they have a ways to go to get that install base.
I'd say the future is less bright for non-*nix commercial operating systems. Netware has the user base, but I don't think it's grown in a few years. NT/2K is growing, but companies won't stomach the restrictive and expensive licensing for long. Forget about the promise of
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
I think people get slightly over excited about the features of linux. Yes it's good, yes it runs on lots of hardware, and yes it even runs on quite big iron.
But, until the software support for linux is at the level it is on IRIX you won't see anything. One of the main reasons we keep our 64bit IRIX boxen about is the visualization software that we simply cannot get for linux. I'd also wait quite a while for 64bit mainstream processors settle before I'd expect linux to make much of an inroad into that market.
There really isn't much of a move on the software front, even still. We'd prefer to be a linux only shop, mainly for support reasons, but it's nowhere near possible at the moment.
The level of support we've received from SGI has also been nothing short of first rate. The cost isn't really that much of a concern, so linux doesn't really attract us from that angle. An open-source OS would be a bonus though (we're an R&D shop, so transparency is great).
Give it time...
jh