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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 think *BSD is dying, but beyond that I really couldn't say.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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
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.
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.