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IBM Calls Linux "Logical Successor" To AIX

Posted by timothy on from the in-line-with-recent-events dept.

pknoll writes "Though it probably won't happen soon, IBM is talking about Linux eventually replacing AIX. The article at Globe Technology states there are IBM folks working on 'chips for 2007' systems, and the viewpoint projected is described as 'multidecade,' but it's an interesting view into the future of IBM and Linux."

12 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Cheaper is better by FatSean · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If Linux support tools evolve to the level of SMIT and other such AIX things, then I can see this happening.

    --
    Blar.
    1. Re:Cheaper is better by gordie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed, it's my hope that like IBM's porting of their journaled file system to Linux, that they will someday do a port of SMIT to Linux. Of all the various tools supplied with all the various Unix "flavors", I've used over the years, SMIT is by far IMHO the best!

    2. Re:Cheaper is better by RFC959 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed, SMIT is pretty good, but in some ways it's too good for the admins' good. What do I mean by that? I mean that because you can do almost anything through SMIT, IBM has very little incentive to make commands usable on their own. Almost every even slightly complicated AIX command ends up needing a syntax like 'command -x -T -f -q0 -R 4096 -n foo -a bar=baz'. As a result, it's hard to do much except through SMIT, because you can't remember the umpty-zillion weird options the command needs. (It doesn't help that AIX manpages tend to be about ten feet long and put the options near the end. As a sysadmin, I don't have a problem with the command line, and I'm used to options! But AIX's are just ridiculous.)

      I don't think we will ever really see SMIT for Linux like SMIT for AIX, though. IBM can make SMIT for AIX because they can control the interface for every part of AIX; they can force it to pass AIX Central Change Control or whatever it's called. They can't do that with Linux...unless it's strictly IBM Linux, and then it's not going to resemble other flavors, so what does it really buy you?

  2. IBM has a sneaky approach... by swordboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They have their own tools but all of a sudden, Linux comes along. Because most middle-management add it to their dictionary of buzzword compliance, IBM simply replaces their existing tools with Linux. Their prices don't change and, all-of-a-sudden, IBM becomes synonymous with buzzword compliancy. And they get to milk developers who work for free!

    --

    Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  3. Re:Buy-in from customer base needed... by Atzanteol · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Performance in the data center isn't there yet for Linux. Almost nobody with a serious databasee will run it on Linux. Even though DB2 and Oracle run on Linux, it's just not as fast yet. 2.6 should hopefully change this, as the kernel developers have been taking suggestions in this area to heart.

    --
    "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

    - Charles Darwin
  4. AIX is dead by Bob+Abooey · · Score: 3, Interesting
    So is Solaris and HP-UX and IRIX, although Solaris will still be around for a while.

    Who do you think Linux has been taking market share away from? It hasn't been Windows as much as the hard core *nix's. The problem is that it doesn't pay IBM or Sun or HP to maintain their own version of *nix if they aren't able to sell enough service contracts and generate enough money to keep the OS moving forward. Thus they die and move to using Linux where they don'thave to invest as much money into research and dev because much of that is done for free.

    This is actually the rightful conclusion for *nix as all the splintering that happened is now going to un-happen and migrate to Linux.

    Makes sense to me.

    --

    All the best,
    --Bob

  5. Not quite what it seems... by joebagodonuts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

    --
    "Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
    1. Re:Not quite what it seems... by McSpew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

      Excellent point. Anybody who actually read the article (and it's been up on News.com's website for a couple of days now) knows that IBM's AIX folks are surprised to hear that AIX's days are apparently numbered.

      Basically, the article quotes one guy from IBM as saying that he foresees the day when Linux will replace AIX in IBM's lineup. The odds are that he's right simply because it costs so much to develop a Unix and keep it current, and IBM wants to be able to have you scale up from a low-end Intel box to a Z-series mainframe with any stop in between and take your software with you. Linux is the one OS that runs on all of IBM's hardware.

      But that said, it'll be awhile and the AIX guys won't go quietly. They'll probably have some kind of AIX-compatibility libraries that they'll license to their customers the way SCO is planning to do with their libraries. IBM may also port their AIX management tools to Linux and license those separately, as well. Who knows what the future will hold, but it's likely that Linux will simply absorb AIX's capabilities in IBM's product lineup at some point. This means that even if AIX goes away, it won't really go away--it'll just change shape.

      One last point. As someone pointed out in the article, "IBM has never decommissioned an operating system, and they're not about to start now."

  6. porting software by PD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for a small company in Austin TX that ports software. We like to brag that we can port anything to anything, but in reality, all the work that I seem to be doing is porting from either Solaris or HP-UX to Linux. AIX takes a very close second to the targets that we are porting to. Of course, this is very biased, since we're an IBM business partner. :-) I'm sure there's ports going on somewhere to Solaris and HP-UX.

    In all of the arrangements that I've been involved with IBM on, their people have been completely indifferent about porting to Linux in preference to AIX. They simply don't seem to care what the hardware is running, as long as the customer is buying shiny new IBM boxes.

    Something interesting though - IBM's Visual Age for C++ compiler was a pain in the ass to figure out. There's a zillion command line switches, and getting the right ones set to build proper dynamic libraries took a bit of figuring out. gcc was much nicer in that regard. But, now that I've got them figured out, I really like IBM's compiler more than gcc 2.95. I haven't had the luck of using gcc 3.2.1 yet (third party libraries aren't typically built with it yet, and I use Debian at home) but I can't wait. That new gcc compiler will really be sweet.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  7. Re:Why X? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First, let me point you towards Wikipedia's history of Unix

    Also, I found this on Usenet, hopefully it will give you a good idea on the background of Unix:

    Hi,

    I can give you a brief "unofficial" history of Unix. Some may contest these statements, as is their right, but to my understanding, most of the statements below are believed to be true. I wouldn't base my paper on this, but maybe it will be enough to point you in the right direction.

    I think the story begins a AT&T Bell labs, where a bunch of scientists spent an incredibly large amount of money, time and effort in the development of an operating system called MULTIX. MULTIX was supposed to be the operating system to beat all operating systems. It was to be multi-tasking, multi-user, multi-everything. Unfortunately, in the course of its development, it grew so large and so complicated, that the "powers that were" ordained its demise. The result, it was never finished. That is not to say, however, that nothing was accomplished. Although MULTIX as an operating system was never completed, many of the tools, utilities, shells, interfaces, etc.... were. Those parts of MULTIX which were completed for eventual use in MULTIX were integrated into the development environment used by the programmers and devellopers on the project. This development environment was at that time the most advanced, most flexible, and most useable environment around. You can image the agony those scientists went through when they had to go back to the old way of doing things. So great was this agony, that a small group of scientists decided to do something about it. They decided to try to create something like MULTIX. Not the giant, undecipherable vehemoth that they had spent so many hours and dollars on, but a smaller, simpler operating system that would run on one machine ONLY. So they wrote an operating system. Someone made a joke about how it wasn't MULTIX because it didn't run on multiple platforms, and it didn't do all that MULTIX would have done, but because it only ran on one machine, they would call it UNIX (Many say this is a fictional account). They put into Unix, all of the tools, utilities, interfaces, etc that they had loved from the MULTIX development environment. They were happy. That is until the machine for which they had written their Unix was decommissioned and replaced by a newer machine. Then, horror of horrors, they realized that they were going to loose their precious Unix. Their Unix, written entirely in assembly, would have to ported to the new machine. This meant many hours of re-writing assembly code, testing, debugging, and headaches. Then they had a brainstorm that would thrust Unix into the hall of OS fame. They would write their new version of Unix in a high level programming language (they chose C) instead of assembly. This was truly revolutionary, and had vast reprocussions. By the time their first working version was produced, the new Unix was only about 10% assembly language code. This would now mean that in order to port Unix to a new platform, they no longer had to rewrite the entire thing, only the part that was specific to that particular platform. The C code could be compiled and the port would be complete. This meant that Unix was now truly portable. It was now closer to being all that MULTIX had promised than MULTIX ever got. In years to come, as Unix grew in popularity, development was split (I'm not sure how) between AT&T Bell Labs and The University of California, Berkley. At this point Unix began to become more and more diverse as two different philosophies were used to push development further. This is how we came to have all the different "flavors" of unix that we have today.

    Short, general, and subject to arguement, but I hope this helps.

    Glen.

    And finally, correct me if I am wrong, but it is assumed that Linux gets it's name because it is the brainchild of Linus Torvalds

  8. Re:Why X? by tesmako · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually you got it backwards, Multics was extremely multiuser, was the reasoning behind the name. UNIX started out as largely a singleuser simplification of Multics (which was a very complex system), first named UNICS, which makes the pun much simpler to understand. The name was changed to UNIX when multiuser support was added.

    Multics is really to operating systems what Algol was to programming languages, the huge research project where they found a lot of the do's and dont's in operating system design. A great system all in all, a bit too ahead of its time though.

    See http://www.wagoneers.com/UNIX/City-U/Multics/ for more information.

  9. Crucial part of the article by shut_up_man · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Customers have a finite amount of money they can spend on applications, hardware, operating systems, storage and the other components of their computing infrastructure, Mr. Mills explained. "Reducing the cost of the operating system allows them to spend more money elsewhere," he said.

    I think this is the crucial part of this article, and the crucial point that most Linux-embracing companies are running with. With Microsoft, the money goes Microsoft and Intel/AMD. MS OSes only run on Intel/AMD hardware. Microsoft's apps only run on Microsoft OSes. Basically, IBM and Sun and the rest are getting bugger all money from this entire market segment, and widespread acceptence of Linux might change all that.

    If Linux gets big, these guys are back in the game, getting a slice of everyone's cash. They can sell hardware that runs Linux, and their apps can run on a platform not controlled by Microsoft. And, since Linux runs on everything from a watch to a toaster to a PC to bigass servers, their apps have the potential to be just about anywhere. That's a future IBM would love to come true.

    I've worked with a bunch of IBM and Lotus guys and gals, and daaaaammmmnnnn do they hate Microsoft. They'd put Redmond to the torch if they thought it would get them back in the game. I don't honestly think they'd smoke AIX to make Linux succeed, but they definitely see it is a brighter future.