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Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead"
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
Gee ... you think he'd at least be able to SPELL B-S-D.
(it's funny, laugh!).
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Isn't this a little like those trolls that post obituaries on /. for people who aren't dead yet? Anyway, I sort of agree with him, moving to Linux makes the most sense for traditional UNIX vendors that want to keep up with the market.
Anyways, so what?
-Sean
It is official; Dell's CIO confirms: Unix is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Unix community when IDC confirmed that Unix market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of any computer. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Unix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Unix is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Unix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Unix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Unix because Unix is dying. Things are looking very bad for Unix. As many of us are already aware, Unix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Unix is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Unix developers Some_Engineer#1 and Some_Engineer#2 only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Unix is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Unix leader Linus Torvalds states that there are 7000 users of Unix. How many users of Unix are there? Let's see. The number of Unix versus Wannabee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Unix users. Unix posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Unix posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Unix. A recent article put Unix at about 80 percent of the Unix market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Unix users. This is consistent with the number of Unix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of nobody, abysmal sales and so on, Unix is going out of business and is being taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled OS. Now Unix is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Unix has steadily declined in market share. Unix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Unix is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Unix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *nix is dead.
Fact: Unix is dying.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Large financial organizations are typically *just* moving away from COBOL based apps running on VMS and SCO to Java and C apps running on Solaris on Sun Hardware.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Considering that I've migrated from systems such as NeXT and AIX to Linux-based solutions with very few problems, I'd put forth the assertion that any Linux distribution would qualify as `UNIX' to most lay definitions of the term. I've even taken applications from Oracle/WinNT to Oracle/RedHat with minor issues. Computer operating systems are simply getting better; more commoditizied, which is why Microsoft is afraid of Linux right now. The "UNIX vendors" are still shipping machines, but with Linux installed instead of their "big iron" legacy UNIX systems. I think that he should have said "Operating Systems are Dead" instead -- which is how it should be; the computer should simply get out of our way and let us get jobs done in an efficient manner.
What used to be home-user shops, such as Dell, can now ship high-quality UNIX solutions thanks to Linux and BSD. Quibbling over the proper definition of UNIX seems silly. If it looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX and runs the source found on "legacy" UNIX systems, well, what is it?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Hmm... Could it be that Dell has an interest in actively killing enterprise-class unix, given that Dell doesn"t manufacture any serious unix hardware. (I know you can installed various flavors of unix on Dell servers and workstations, but Dell has clearly and intentionally linked its own success to Microsoft's.)
This is about as surprising as Microsoft claiming that open source software is crap.
To me, This just smacks of wishful thinking and marketing.
John C. Dvorak writes "Unix is Dead! Wanna Fight??".
Also, here is a funny comeback from http://www.superhero.org "Windows 95 is finally out, and I keep reading in all the consultants' columns that UNIX is dead. I believe them, of course--they're paid well to make such pronouncements--but UNIX seems pretty lively for a corpse. Whenever a hardware vendor brings out the latest hot box, it seems to be running UNIX; the telecom industry still likes UNIX pretty much; and there sure seem to be a lot of UNIX users out there on the Internet. If UNIX is so old, how can it be producing offspring like that little scamp, Linux?
"Maybe these consultants are confusing dying with age. UNIX is old, a lot older than the other operating systems that have long since passed on. In spite of its twenty-six years, however, UNIX continues to crunch numbers while younger systems can only gum them till they're mushy. What explains this mysterious longevity?
"I have a theory. UNIX survives because, unlike other operating systems, it lacks doubt and guilt. UNIX does just what you tell it to, as quickly and efficiently as it can, and then it waits for more work. It doesn't worry about whether what you asked it to do was fair, beneficial, or even sensible. It just does it.
"By contrast, Windows frets about you. It offers you hints and choices and dialog boxes. Help is everywhere (for what it's worth). And if you ask Windows to do anything of consequence, it asks you to confirm your request, and then it tells you what it did. Delete a large number of files, and Windows is exhausted. It's not the work, it's the *stress*. It's no wonder that Windows systems tend to freeze up where a UNIX system would crash.
"UNIX snorts at Windows-style solicitude. UNIX doesn't ask you to confirm--if you didn't want it to do what you asked, why did you ask it? Similarly, it won't annoy you by reporting the consequences of what you did. Why would you enter a command if you don't first know its consequences?"
Suhit
From Dennis Ritchie's point of view, Linux is Unix.
But if GNU's Not UNIX, then is GNU/Linux Unix or not?
The other issue here is cost.
Some background on Randy Mott, Dell's CIO. Before joining Dell, he was the CIO at Wal*Mart. Both Dell and Wal*Mart are kings of supply chain and operations management, especially cost reduction. This guy is very good at squeezing cost out of corporate IT infrastructures while delivering first rate solutions to his internal corporate customers. Any hyperbole aside, if Randy Mott speaks, he knows what he's talking about, and he knows what he's doing. It may not be right for every organization, but I guarantee it'll be right for Dell.
Since I worked on the earliest versions of Berkeley Unix, I can clarify this (the terse version is "BSD used to be UNIX, but that was a long time ago"):
The original Berkeley Unix was indeed a set of mods to the Bell Labs Unix code (which unfortunately were not accepted by Bell Labs/AT&T in a hissy fit of Not Invented Here Syndrome).
However licensing issues kept getting in the way of efforts of people like Bill Jolitz to make BSD Unix available on PCs (386 PCs, back then). This was another really nasty battle that reflected quite badly on AT&T, and caused untold trauma for Jolitz, other BSD developers, and of course the teeming masses that wanted affordable Unix on their PCs.
Therefore a huge effort was made to strip out all of the original Bell Labs source code.
Modern BSD distributions, like FreeBSD, therefore have none of the original Unix code, and properly should be called workalikes, just like Linux.
I've been using Linux for lo, these many years, so I'm out of touch with BSD issues, however there's every reason to think that BSD is a more exact workalike than Linux, since it started out as Unix and only gradually had each component rewritten as a close copy of the functionality of the original. Some purists care about this, I don't.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded. BSD is superior in that regard, and in a few other places. (Many places where BSD had a similar edge in the past are now obsolete issues; Linux has mostly caught up.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
In short, he did not say Unix is dead, I think he said Solaris is dead. Of course, Dell sells server, and Sun sells server.
"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
What was the last thing that Dell innovated? They get on board of every industry group and use the products of that group, but they NEVER contribute anything. All the other majors drop big coin on R&D, but not Dell. That's why they make so much money. Licensing is cheap compared to research.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I've been in the computer bidness since 1988 and I have heard "UNIX is dead" at least 15 times since then. Every time, it refuses to die.
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Wonder if by respond, they mean the response that I usually get from Sun: "That will be fixed in Solaris 12...and don't forget to renew your maintenance contract, it expires at the end of the month."
Ha ha ha...respond instantly my ass. I'll take the open source response to bug fixes any day.
Two problems with this article:
1) By many popular definitions, Linux and BSD are unices. The announcement that "UNIX is dead" is too sweeping a term to be safely used.
2) We have no way to quantify what differences in performance are attributable to software rather than hardware in the given example, nor does one anecdotal application constitute a complete comparison between Solaris/SPARC and RHL/ia32.
This article seems to have more to do with squabbles between Dell and the traditional iron peddlers over market share in the enterprise sector than anything else.