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?"

Comments

My extremely biased opinion

[photon317]

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.