Slashdot Mirror
On The Death Of Unix
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview with Red Hat Asia Pacific boss Gus Roberston, he tells ZDNet why he believes Unix will be dead since in future, there will only be two operating systems left (for corporations). "We don't see ourselves competing against Microsoft. We are taking market share away from Unix," he said. However, IDC counters Robertson's claim saying Unix market share has actually been increasing in that part of the world."
And then there is the newest Unix on the block, a BSD variant, known as OS X. A User Friendly Unix.
Best Slashdot Co
If Red Hat isn't marketing a UNIX clone, then what's it marketing now? Last time I checked, Linux is a UNIX clone. Sure, it's not SCO UNIX(R)(TM), but it's still UNIX. Sometimes I wonder whether these MBAs really know what the hell they're trying to sell or if they just have a form process to market anything.
Since Redhat runs on zSeries architecture, he might like to acknowledge a certain other Enterprise OS - z/OS.
Phil
That asks "is $TECHNOLOGY dead?" is FUD.
Period.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
...Long live Unix (as linux)
Linux confirms: Unix is dying?
I wonder what Netcraft has to say about all this. Not to mention the charnel houses...
That doesn't quite wash. Several government agencies here in the US have made a steady migration from Windows to UNIX or Linux. It appears that more are getting on the bandwagon, too. Such being the case, I can't see UNIX losing too much ground, at least in business. Maybe in the home market it has lost ground, but there seems to be a healthy move in favor of UNIX in the workplace in certain areas.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
The more important thing that's dying is unaccountability in software - whether Microsoft or *nix from HP, Sun, SGI etc. Linux has ensured that s/w firms talk first about featiures from user's point of view, not the code itself. And that's a big victory - not whether Linux is taking marketshare from Unix or Windows.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I think is what they expect to happen. and they're probably right, I use Linux on a desktop, but I know too many people that can't even cope with Windows which (despite it's flaws) goes out of it's way to be easy enough for a child to use. Linux is great, but it's not for the masses, and there is no money to be made with Linux on the desktop (well not much) the likes of IBM invest in linux for servers becuase they can then sell the hardware and the support, but that means investment in making it a first class server OS, and not much on making it an easy-to-use desktop environment. I think redhat realise that proprietary UNIX's are their only real space to grow in.
.Sig. temporarily unavailable due to terminal lack of inventivness
What is this "rival OS Unix" he is talking about? AIX? Solaris? Tru64? BSD/OS? What?
I'd rather have RH aiming at MS' market share. If he just wants to compete with other Unices, then in the end MS will prevail.
The combination of Palladium in OS and hardware would be really uncomfortable for up-and-rising Asian countries.
I think that now is a big chance to gain a lot of market share with Linux or BSD. Those countries don't have a lot to spend (yet) and you can ask yourself if they will want to commit themselves to Microsoft vendor lock-in (read: License 6.0). I wouldn't if I were them.
So Linux/Un*x vendors should unite, and not compete (too much). If they will, then the third dog will grab the bone.
"Unix is dead".. at least the IP will outlive SCO.
Trolling is a art,
You and your brother OpenServer shan't be missed very much.
I disagree with his sentiment, however. It's just a matter of what runs best on what platform. Irix will still be best on SGI hardware, and Solaris will still be best on Sun hardware. And who knows....maybe Sun will bring it up to snuff when they start shipping AMD64 machines. People will run software that best fits their needs and the machine they're using. RedHat on commodity PC hardware might do most of it now, but it certainly won't do all of it.
and for a little walk through memory lane The UNIX Story. Also also lets not forget MS UNIX, Xenix IIRC
Rus
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In the future there will be 2 os's. Windows and Unix.
I consider Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX/MacOSX/etc Unix.
Some variants may have orginal AT&T code while some do not.
But unless you get into the embedded market, Unix and Windows are the 2 main players.
#3 Netware is now going to turn into a Linux in the near future.
I agree though that opensource is eating up Unix more then Windows but its still unix.
http://saveie6.com/
"I don't use [product] any more."
"What? but, Agnes you've always used [product].
"Nope, now I've switched--to *NEW*, *IMPROVED* [product]. It's even tastier, more absorbent, and 22.6% faster-acting!"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Linux is not Unix. Essentially, Unix is something that comes from the Unix codebase, which, essentially, Linux does not. Linux implements Posix, just like a Unix, but it does so many other things better.
This is a good way to point out the similaries and differences. Linix and Unix both do posix. Linux is not Unix.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
how the hell did a troll end up as a story?
is that RedHat's bosses have moronic ideas.
From 'don't use Linux on the desktop' to 'UNIX is dead', and I'm sure they can do even better.
Just too bad that '640K ought to be enough for anyone' has already been said.
Reality check, Red Hat:
We don't see ourselves competing against Microsoft.
Too bad for you, because Microsoft certainly thinks that Linux is its number one competitor. And don't kid yourself: they will do whatever is needed to crush you.
Oh, and if you think you can steal market shares from, let us say, Sun, without them making a fuss, I think you are mistaken too. Last time I checked, Sun is still worth more money than Red Hat...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Various reasons... but in any case...
The death of UNIX was predicted 20 years ago... it was prediced 10 years ago.
History is doomed to repeat itself in the eyes on unenlightened RedHat employees. Sorry, but although many Fortune 500 companies are now deploying Linux, very few of them are deploying Linux to replace their traditional UNIX systems which they have BILLIONS of dollars invested.
So give me a break... UNIX will be around for another 20 years, believe it or not.
Is that some old Linux distro?
Proprietary Unix is dead or dying, long live open Unix, i.e. Linux and uh.. BSD.
Quality free open software is, to state the fairly obvious, a category killer, i.e. software against which it makes no business sense to compete. This is good news if you are a user, bad news if you were a competitor.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
(Bashes head against wall) Someone wake me when all this UNIX is dead, dying, ect. crap is over.
I'm wondering if this Boss at Redhat is too far up the chain that he can't see the forest for the trees.
Is he only looking at profit statements when he voices his opinion? I would suspect that the business side of Redhat brings them the most moolah ($$). Hence, from that point of view his statement is valid.
However, he fails to recognize the desktop linux, small server farms that are using Linux or Windows and the battle that is going on there. I would suspect that most people using Linux in this environment are using a downloaded copy with a few using a purchased copy for support reasons.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Tom.
Oh arse
Because Microsoft dominates so much in "the Windows Operating System" it has caused this kind of thing to become the norm in the press. That's what is so sickening.
Microsoft Windows XP is what most non geek people understand as an "operating system". If they even get as far as having operating system in their vocabulary. Most non geeks I talk to think that Office is part of Windows. MS Windows 2003 server by default is :
UNIX is really the foundation for a system which does not compete with Windows directly anyway, which is why there are so many vendors and flavours. Each has their own approach to one or many of the software options included but within the Windows Kernel, but within userspace and API territory. Especially stuff like file managers, browser integration, and multimedia.
Linux is just a kernel. You need another set of tools before you have anything half decent to run. Most people have GNU stuff, plus some other random addons from here, there and everywhere, plus for desktop use at least a window manager from KDE, Gnome or something a bit more minimal.
So UNIX cannot die, as an abstract concept. Maybe vendors who sell mostly UNIX will lose revenue or market share, but they all have Linux solutions too. HP, Sun (remember Cobalt...), IBM...
Microsoft, in their entire domination, have got everyone where it hurts - because they supply a COMPLETE system that, while each of the parts is not the best technically, is a package that nobody else is even pretending to supply, except maybe Red Hat, and the other big distros. The press just don't know how to explain that to the public each time so they come up with utter crap like 'UNIX is dying'...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Remember all the Microsoft Certified gurus sounding this same death nell in 1999? We've heard this all before. Y2K proved that UNIX is not only viable, but quite often preferrable. The idea that there will be only 2 is a stretch in my opinion. 2 dominate, maybe, but tw total is rediculous and frankly shows that this guy must be in marketing.
I use linux, but until there's 3-5 yrs worth of high end unix usage, it's not going to be remotely close to replacing the huge 32-64 CPU systems. Stability on that kind of hardware is hard to obtain and maintain. There are classes of problems that need big hardware, like large terabyte databases. Robertson is just spewing out more PR hype to get more business.
Take a look at this which talks about the future MIPS machines, which will still run Irix. Irix, despite its weirdness, can still do things Linux can't. Go take a look at a very high end Irix server (something like an Origin 2k or 3k), and you'll see the difference.
I got to say, his words lack credibility, especially if he can't even count the current number of major operating system.
If Red Hat isn't marketing a UNIX clone, then what's it marketing now? Last time I checked, Linux is a UNIX clone. Sure, it's not SCO UNIX(R)(TM), but it's still UNIX. Sometimes I wonder whether these MBAs really know what the hell they're trying to sell or if they just have a form process to market anything.
No, what he said was exactly right.
"We are making a product foo, which is a clone of bar. Foo competes mostly with bar, and will kill off bar within a decade."
How hard is that to understand?
Weavers are a clone of triscuits, and saying that "triscuits will be dead within the decade, killed by weavers" is an entirely valid statement.
May we never see th
UNIX is a philosophy about how to present computing resources to the programmer and user. Some components include hierarchial files, I.O devices are files, pipes of simple applications, and so on. AT7T, BSD, Linux, etc. follow this pretty closely, even if the underlying code is different.
I'm not sure just why Red Hat thinks that it can dethrone the current hogs in the UNIX arena. Even IBM isn't ready for that one. Red Hat needs to think clearer when thinking in the light of Enterprise systems. Granted over the past five years I've witnessed a development in Linux that moved faster than anyone expected. Red Hat ignores the fundementals of Enterprise systems, which is 99.9% uptime. They continue to ignore LVM and let sistina go down that path alone. I for one feel that the LVM in HP-UX, AIX and Solaris are far more powerful then that in Linux. LVM2 will be a step in the right direction. Linux still needs a unified I/O subsystem scanning utility, such as HP-UX's ioscan. As of right now each driver implementation is still creating its own subsystem scanning utility to search for new hardware. The biggest issue that Red Hat ignore's is the fact that in ext3 you can not extend a filesystem with out unmounting it first. The basis of being able to extend file systems is that youcan add space with out powering off the machine and not have down time. Now if you have to unmount the volume first you might as well power the sucker off and add some new hardware. I've worked with enterprise systems for a long time and these are just a few of my gripes but Linux has a way to go before its wholely excepted by the Enterprise UNIX world. But don't get me wrong I believe its just a matter of time, and if Red Hat doesn't change their ways someone else will come along and steal their market. Its amazing how well Open Source works with the Free Market.
Linux is freakin' *everywhere*.
Set-top boxes, watches, radios, DVD players, arcade video game cabinets, traffic lights, webcams, surveillance-cams, networking hubs, point-of-sale cash registers, automobiles, submarines, tanning booths, theme-park rides, oh, and lest we forget beowulf and the server/desktop worlds.
To say that "Unix is Dead" is to set up a straw man... lets argue about 'why unix is or is not dead' and in the meantime ignore the fact - *FACT* - that the Linux kernel is revolutionizing computing as we know it.
It is a totally free OS, and it is being used every day by hardware manufacturers around the world, in extremely diverse markets, to bring new product to light.
I wouldn't call that dead. I'd call anyone calling it dead a moron, though...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Slashdot article: Something is dead and/or dying
Discussion:
It's not dead, I use it all the time.
It's dead for the following reasons...
Flame 1...n (although highly informative flamewar)
Windows sucks.
Sun will go down biting and clawing, if it even happens.
HP has been focusing on their 64 processor SuperDome. What are you going to run on that, Windows, Linux (better) or HP-UX (best)?
IBM still has a major investment in AIX and will continue to push it. Why? Notice some of the stuff IBM hasn't released to the general public yet such as JFS2 (dynamic inode allocation, finally). If they were going to toss AIX they would more than likely give away whatever source they could, and that hasn't happened yet. That and not to mention those pSeries are very powerful and very, very expensive. I'm sure there are installations running SuSE on them but I would bet that 98% of them are AIX.
Novell know Netware is a dying breed (and won't come back) and will probably starting pushing Linux all they can.
The UNIX market still brings in billiions every year, why stop?
AIX?
IRIX?
Solaris?
When/where do you need these OS's anymore?
The big render farms are distributed Linux setups. Big websites? Linux clusters. Workstations? Linux. Smaller web servers, DNS servers, firewalls? Linux.
It seems someone wants to celebrate the Death of UNIX at least once a year, why not make it a national holiday? Let all the SysAdmins take a day off.
Remember how Windows 95 died, and then suddenly there were no Windows users left in the world? Yeah, I thought it might be something like that...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I just say two words: Big Iron.
See how e.g. OpenBSD had to fight to get the UltraSparcIII documentation [1]. That was the documentations for a freakin' CPU - not something like the complete drawings for a Boeing 777. If They can't even get the documentation for the CPU, how on earth can anyone else really be expected to interface to it. Ergo; either they die or they continue to sell their proprietary Unix running on proprietary hardware.
They, proprietary Unix vendors, AFAIK write operating systems that are intended to run on 32+ CPU's. In the case of e.g. Linux it was added as an afterthought, even if it might be good at it.
Imagine you need some big iron, let's say sustained >10GB/s I/O (disk) throughput and 1e6 I/O operations/s while crunching more numbers than I'd like to think existed, all from >100k different "clients". Insane? What about a bank central, or a hub for airline booking? Those numbers do add up...
Given even a tenth of these numbers as a requirement, would you seriously suggest a Linux solution (if anyone in the back of the room yells "Microsoft" they'll be kicked out, head first, from the 21:st floor)?
[1] (if it's really legal to withold even CPU spec's I leave to someone else to comment on)
... by going open source. Here's why - my equation:
...as there are no (mandatory) commercial forces on OS projects - but you lot know all this - eventually Sun, HP, etc will have to see that freeing up the code for their waning Unices is the only way to sustain their dwindling customer base.
Open Source Project + user demand = invincibility
Should we be predicting the death of Unix or the death of the (normally) expensive hardware that it runs on. IIRC, owning SPARC hardware grants you a license to run Solaris, which last i checked could be downloaded for free. But its the SPARC hardware thats expensive. Sure you can get a SunBlade150 for like $2000, but you can get a really nice PC/average Mac for that much. If i could run Tru64 on my PC, I would(i know about x86 solaris and last i tried .. it sucked bad). For me, it is the cost of the hardware that will kill off AIX/Solaris/Tru64/IRIX/HP-UX/etc. I guess you can always ebay for older stuff, but its just not the same as that spiffy new box.
hope i wan't have to remove my "unix forever" tatoo from my arm.
I love the comment they threw in about how "Unix" has had great multithreading since FOREVER and NTPL is helping get into that league (RHES is "coming of age"). Yeah... Care to be more specific? I certainly hope they didn't mean Unixware or something...
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
In the world today, there are two operating system camps:
The Microsoft Windows family.
And everything else.
"Everything else" are UNIX family and clone operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, IRIX, Solaris, BSD, and more.
Windows is built by one company, and based on an operating system model that was flawed from the start.
The UNIX operating system was built with security in mind and has one advantage--there are far, far more experienced users, programmers and administrators who seek to better and strengthen the OS from malicious attacks than there are crackers experienced enough to attempt to compromise it.
Count the number of Windows-based viruses, trojans, and other malware, and then try to find a number for UNIX-based attacks.
Sooner or later, some malware will arrive that does the Unthinkable on a Windows box. A nearby Mac OS X and Linux box will likely go untouched. Watch managerial heads turn. Watch for the shift.
Microsoft could make this so easy and profitable for themselves by taking a Linux distribution (it's free), branding it "Windows LX" or whatever--and rewriting their software so that it compiles and works with every single UNIX that wants to use it. Talk about profit. Talk about security. (To some, talk about competition.)
A single-user architecture and flawed structure like Windows has doesn't have a lot of life. It merely has a lot of copies sold. Once damage from malware shows how unprofitable it is to use Wiindows in that sense, a shift may come. In some places, it has already begun.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
There are two OSes now! - Windows and Unices.
Is there anything else left? I dont think so.
Solaris.
Backup Farm (with the 15000 tape robot and 2TB on FC-AL)?
Solaris
Visualization Cluster?
IRIX
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
GNU's Not Unix.
I mean really, what is "Unix". Is it OS design philosphy? Is it a standard way an OS controls processes? Is it a shell? is BSD Unix? Linus is Unix? OsX is Unix?
who knows anymore.
Crap!
I finally figured out vi!
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
Has anyone else noticed that Red Hat, recently, has been using the press to send Microsoft signals along the lines of "Oh we're friendly now. We pose no threat to you. We don't want to compete, we wan't to coexist with you on friendly terms."...........?
I mean, think about it....First, it was "Linux isn't ready for the desktop"...Now, it's "Oh, we're not taking market share away from Windows, we're talking it from Unix."...and about half a dozen little comments inbetween..
WTF?
My contempt for Red Hat, literally, is growing by the day. They've gone from a position of OS leadership into a feeble piss-ant of a company that gave up the reins to their competitors... Red Hat has gone from something we can be proud of, to a company that refuses to believe in the skills and the talents that gave them the fluffy paychecks stock options they're enjoying now. I, for one, want no part of the wholesale cheek-spreading that Red Hat is engadging in. My next distrib install will not be Red Hat.
The fact is, Red Hat _could have_ made a real play for the desktop. All it would have taken is time, and a developer incentive. The desktop/consumer-level (oh, pardon me.. "hobbyist") version WAS making them money, but they abandoned it. What kind of company abandons a _profitable_ product, other than a stupid one?
Bowie J. Poag
(Or maybe the limits of reality) - Roberston is in a position to market Linux. He has little or no control over whether customers choose to replace MS or UNIX systems with it.
Just try to define a business strategy here that would discourage a customer from migrating from UNIX to Linux - Red Hat could offer lousy support for migration, or actually tell sales people to encourage clients to stick with good old UNIX. They could publicly announce that they are there only to compete with Microsoft. Those are not what I would call good business decisions.
There's also the current climate of tight economics and heavy litigation. Why announce that your goal might be to take on MS toe-to-toe? If that was a long term goal, the company doing it would quietly work at areas such as deskop/GUI development, installer packages, and the like, and not discuss it much. Red Hat may not be David to MS's Goliath, but whoever is David is not going to make any noise until they have at least loaded up on rocks for their sling.
Who is John Cabal?
Where did you get this funny piece? :-D
:-))
:-)
"There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond."
I just wet my pants
"BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War."
Ahahaha, too funny
I would really see more kids become hackers instead of just consumer/lusers that think that software grows on trees in India.
Of course I am using 'hacker' in the original sense and not as 'cracker'. I think this guy is really confusing 'hacker' with 'script kiddie'.
Apple has been dead what? At least 50 times now.
BSD, well, let's just not go there.
Linux clearly is on its death bed, what with all those lawsuits by good wholesome Utahmericans fighting communism and
MS is clearly making way too much money to be alive much longer.
Does Unix have any reason to live while others die at least once a week. I say, if Unix doesn't make up its mind soon, let's kill it ourselves!
Cheers.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
So I guess my clients saving > $250k by deploying 40+ servers and 180+ desktops on Fedora instead of MS was a bad decision on my part eh?
Oh well, wait 'til we upgrade the kernels to 2.6, then if I get fired, I'll reconsider. (It's blowing the doors off 2003 in our lab tests, so why not?)
BTW, RH can keep spouting this nonsense til the cows come home. The clients seem to have figured out the savings, and don't give a shit, but it seems pretty weird to FUD your own product.
ahem Linux is not UNix!
nwo theere are some BSD Unixes that ar eUnix becasue they are certified by OPenGroup as Unix but Linux has never been certified by OpenGroup as Unix and never will..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Red Hat Asia Pacific boss Gus Roberston, he tells ZDNet why he believes Unix will be dead since in future, there will only be two operating systems left (for corporations).
The "Linux" API is a knock-off of SYS V UNIX. Only in SCO's eyes is GNU/Linux UNIX(tm). But even the company Bruce Perens was (is?) involved with, Progengy, had in their press release 'We are better because we arn't UNIX' then after it was posted on this very site and some of the readership pointed out how 'Linux is unix', the press release was changed.
He is right, the OS wars are over. Unix beat all commers, if you believe what Microsoft said about NT - It will be a better UNIX than UNIX.
Because we all know that elvis was an alien robot.
I for one, welecome our new non Unix overloards
In soviet Russia, Unix kills You.
There may still be a place for proprietary *NIX. We have yet to see any of the major *NIX companies go under. I think what is a more accurate statement is that Open *NIX OSes (primarily Linux and BSD) are changing the face of UNIX.
What we must look at is how companies have dealt with Linux/BSD. SGI is a prime example. SGI and IRIX were huge in Hollywood...production companies started using commodity (x86) hardware w/ Linux for render farms. Time went along, their staff became more comfortable with Linux and at some point in time, someone decided to replace a workstation with a Linux box. It's cheaper and in some cases it's actually better. So what did SGI do? They decided to make their primary focus x86 machines running Linux. They had to change with their customers to keep their business.
The same thing is happening with IBM...one day in the future, AIX will be a thing of the past. This is a fact that has been stated or hinted at by more than one IBM exec.
And then we have Sun. Solaris will probably go down as the last of the proprietary Unicies. Sun has problems both with support and coding. Solaris is still playing catch-up with features AIX had 10 years ago...and their OS still isn't there.
And last and certainly least, we have SCO...we know how they are dealing with Linux. Of course, when SCO is no more and the "authority" on all things on UNIX is gone, who will pick up the pieces...maybe Sun...
If anything, unix has gained strength, this guy's on crack. Looks like redhat is capitulating. I predict redhat will be selling Windows software in the not too distant future.
All Linux, All BSD = Unix
The Duck Test holds true.
All Unix variants are just that -- derived, cloned, inspired, ruthlessly copied, etc., from Unix. They're still Unix.
Unix isn't dieing; it lives on in these clones.
You know it and I know it. Now deal with it.
What does your deployment of Linux have to do with Unix?
Unfortunately no one can be *told* what Unix is. You have to see it for yourself...
In an interview with Xzine and Unix, Unix tells
Xzine why it believes Gus Roberston will be dead
since in will be in the future. "A Guy (Gus) simply
can only live so long. If he won't last, why hire
him?" it said. However, Robertson countered,
claiming all rumours of his death were exaggerated
and that he was in excellent condition.
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Special reporter chicken little reports the sky is falling. Film at 11 :-D.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
ah, it's been a while since i've seen this one, i salute you !
That's funny....
Apple says it is.
And as far as I'm concerned, Linux and BSD are Unix as well. If it looks like Unix, acts like Unix, etc. Now, had the question been "Will PROPRIETARY Unix die?", well, then maybe you'd have a point. But Linux and BSD have pretty much insured that Unix itself won't die.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
X is not a sufficient or necessary part of a UNIX system (or a UNIX(R) system).
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Here's one quote:
According to Harish Pillay, chief technology architect for Red Hat Asia, the scalability of threading has increased from 1,200 to 32,000 threads with NPTL. This translates to significant performance boosts when running multithreading applications such as Java software and databases, he said. More importantly, the enhancement puts RHEL 3.0 in better stead against rival OS Unix, which has long been equipped with more advanced-threading capabilities.
Whaaat? This guy is the CTO of RH Asia, and doesn't even know WHAT his chief product is? If RedHat Linux is not a variant of Unix, then why is RedHat offering courses on Unix ?
And here's a quote from a RedHat document, titled " History of Unix, Linux, and Open Source / Free Software":
2.1.5. Comparing Linux and Unix
This book uses the term ``Unix-like'' to describe systems intentionally like Unix. In particular, the term ``Unix-like'' includes all major Unix variants and Linux distributions. Note that many people simply use the term ``Unix'' to describe these systems instead.
I can't believe this guy is so high up in RH hierarchy. Doesn't look good for RedHat.
The Penguins are suiciding themselves against the walls of Lindon, Utah
I have been hearing of the death of UNIX for some time now. As best I recall, the first reports of it started coming in in the mid 1980s. These reports always show trends in the number of installations--and there are more UNIX installations now than at any time in the past. The numbers supposedly supporting the demise of UNIX always deal with market share, a number which is bogus on its best day. There are more Toyotas than there are Boeing 747s, but who cares. It's a silly comparison.
Regardless of where you stand on whether Linux (or GNU/Linux, or GNU/Linux+XFree) is Unix or not, it seems to me that GNU/Linux can at least be called a Unix-type or Unix-like OS. If one admits that, then just by the numbers one has to admit that Unix-like operating systems are neither dead nor dying, much as some people would like that to be the case. This much has already been said by other people. The "death of Unix" itself is actually other than what it seems. What is actually happening is that Unix and Unix-like operating systems compete with one another on merit. In this kind of competitive atmosphere, some versions of Unix and Unix-type operating systems will have to give way to others which either perform better, are more secure, more stable and so on. So while one version of "Unix" (in the very broad sense) may die out, others will take its place. This is a completely different scenario from one in which a single operating system is maintained in a dominant position by means of the leveraging of monopoly power. In such a case the merit of the OS itself has very little bearing, except in enticing existing users to adopt newer versions of such an operating system.
King = Windows (Yeah, I know that's ridiculous... Just bear with me a minute...)
Queen = Linux (I know, I know... Hush up a minute, willya?)
Dead = *BSD (QUIET ALREADY!!!)
Now, to put it all together, this wonderful little quote once voiced by Judy Karne(sp?) on 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In"...
"The King is Queen. God save the Dead..."
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
"We don't see ourselves competing against Microsoft. We are taking market share away from Unix," he said. Robertson claimed RHEL can typically offer users three times the performance for one-third the costs of Unix platforms. "In future, there will only be two operating systems left. Unix will be dead," he claimed.
This would only make sense if Windows and *nixes were the only enterprise OSes available. They're not. OpenVMS, for example - just ported to Itanium and now in prerelease use among selected clients. Don't forget VM and OS/400 - these will be around as long as IBM's customers demand them.Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
``Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.'' -- rob pike, Bell Labs 1991
And I'm sorry to tell you that every bit of that applies to Linux and *BSD.
Of interest is also "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant".
Get the only OS that doesn't stink while you still have a chance:
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
(and now it's *really* OpenSource)
Plan 9 is what the creators of UNIX thought UNIX should have been. Here is the paper that explains why and how they decided to replace UNIX:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
uriel
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
Im glad I saw this article now! I went ahead and dropped my Unix class next spring. Thank God!
Ill go ahead and take a win2k3 server class instead.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Linux or Windows for desktop.
:-P
BSD for servers.
Kernel, shell, applications?
I've seen post like "use Unix, then Linux, and tell me the difference" So does something like Cygwin make Windows XP Unix? The "duck" test would indicate that Windows XP with Cygwin is a Unix operating system. I have a hard time believing it.
According to Microsoft, NT is POSIX compatible ( POSIX.1, POSIX.5, POSIX.9). Does that make it Unix?
The Linux kernel is pretty much Linux, not Unix. The environment is GNU, which is Not Unix. So what makes Linux Unix?
this guy is a troll, I work for a huge company, we just met with the RH product managers and eventually several of their Board of Directors, the off-shoot is we told them to FO, and we've taken the Linux kernel and our in-house staff has begun to personalize it. For years we were a RH house but our management FINALLY realized we don't have to take what they what to feed us we can engineer it ourselves, Our Board of Director sponsor just asked why we were not using LINUX EVERYWHERE... I consider this a total victory FINALLY :) GOOD-BYE M$, and RH WOOOOHOOOO
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
UNIX has no chance of being wiped out, even if Red Hat WASN'T UNIX. The universe runs on UNIX. Anything that made a concerted attempt to destroy UNIX would get kill -9'ed by the universe itself.
Honestly, I don't think even MS could kill UNIX. Its programmers aren't creative; they just steal ideas, repackage them and take over the market with them.
Long live UNIX.
Only 2 ? the guy is dreaming.
.. they are just not relevant any more. Game over.
#1 OS - Embedded Linux & variants - running mobile phones, PDAs, cars, fridges, toasters, etc.
#2 OS - Free Unix variants - Linux, BSD, etc, running the desktops, front end systems and clustered servers.
#3 OS - Commercial Unixen, Solaris - MacOS - zSeries Linux - HPUX - Irix - as part of turn-key big mother mission critical systems.
#4 OS - Proprietry Commercial OSen, MVS (or whatever they run on mainframes these days), OpenVMS-II, Tandem Guardian, NSA super secret hackproof proprietry OS, and other weird ass stuff that does some very specific job.
Did I mention Microsoft at all ? no
Unix is user friendly!
It's just very selective about who it makes friends with.
you will get the same response in UNIX, Linux, BSD, and OSX.
Their code may come from different places, but they look the same to the user.
*The subject line was not intended to show disrespect to Vi users.
photosMy Photostream
Red Hat was a variation of Linux (lieu-neeks) that was popular at the turn of the century.
Apple has been dying for decades. UNIX is dead = FUD
photosMy Photostream
I dont see UNIX dieing. Here at work we have 6 IBM R/S 6000 boxes all running UNIX, and will countinue so until we are out of bussiness, world ends, 2nd comming of Christ. I could see our company making a switch from windows NT to a Linux OS for all of our office pc's and laptops but the main backbone which handels all customer transactions, customer database and shipping will always run unix.
This Sig for rent.
Linux sucks compared to FreeBSD! Linux is for kids, FreeBSD is for men!
It's just pining for the fjords
The way that I can get several browsers for free *is* good news for me as a browser user. One of them is mozilla, which is even better news.
How on earth does my point relate to IE bundling being OK? I'm not sure that it is OK, but that's an unrelated issue.
It might be worth competing against IE, because MS can take thier code back home, and refuse to play anymore at any time (Didn't they do that on the mac?), leaving you ahead. With GPL'd code, you don't even have that hope, but then again, you don't have a big company owning the software. Any number can play.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
RedHat is the only company trying to do something different, your hatred of them is better placed elsewhere.
I think RedHat has been on a good track recently, allowing Fedora to do its thing, and focus their business on corporate enterprise. It's what's good for RedHat, and if you think that they have some sort of obligation to the opensource community that puts them in jeopardy, business-wise, then you'd be wrong and naive.
Various folks have been predicting the
(dum dum de dum)
Death of Apple
on a monthly basis for the past twenty years.....
Now Apple adopts a version of Unix (giving due nods to hairsplitting definitions of the term)
and naturally at the speed of light we hear of the
(dum dum de dum)
Death of Unix.
One might just as soon proclaim the
(dum dum de dum)
Death of Uranium
cheers!
Oh yeah, in case you forgot.
Apple is going out of business.
They expect to file chapter 11 sometime next week.
Again.
This information may or may not be entirely accurate, maybe.
Using your criteria, there is no difference between a bus, a train, or an airplane - as long as you keep your eyes tightly shut!
You and WireDog can choose to remain ignorant of the differences, but that won't make them go away...
Linux is to Unix as the child is to the father - superficially similar (two legs, one nose, etc.) but also very different, and hopefully better.
Moving away from the flamebait... What does IDC consider UNIX? Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Fujitsu? Specically, is it counting Linux? (I'll take the notion of *BSD and MacOsX being considered unices for the purposes of your argument)
And we'll leave the notion of 'is a unix-like personality running on top of OS layer (like Mach)' alone for now. But yeah, mklinux, Mac OsX, Linux on OS/390 all fit into that gray area...
I'm fed up with Red Hat! They are trying to be the Microsoft of open source and behaving like that.
;)
For me, there is no sympathy left to Red Hat.
Please Netcraft; confirm that Redhat is dying.
less is more
Looks like many people here define "Unix" as "anything that runs the shell that I've used on Unix." Note that these shells have virtually all been ported to MS Windows in one form or another-- guess that means MS Windows is Unix.
Good Riddance.
SCO inherited much of the rights to the original "Unix" codebase, and is now in the process of self-destructing and taking "Unix" with it. Alternatives such as Linux, OSX, etc., have caused most to forget what makes "Unix", and currently, it's whatever OSDL says it is, but noone really cares what they say it is anymore.
It wouldn't be Linux, but it could be one of the exokernel OSes. With an exokernel you can have the UNIX/POSIX compatibility in one of the libraries. This way you get flexibility and performance of an exokernel for new software, and legacy support for the existing UNIX apps.
Exokernels are just hardware multiplexors to support concurrent access, etc., the rest of the system is built from libraries (modules). This way a developer can have a much closer view of the hardware. A typical Unix developer has to deal with Unix APIs and a large, complex and quite an unpredictable (performance-wise) kernel to access the hardware, which trades flexibility and performance for portability (and even writing good portable Unix software is hard in practice). A database or a web server with a specialized file system would be a good example of an app taking advantage of an exokernel I think. A several hundred percent improvement in performance over a legacy Unix server such as the new Apache with a standard Unix FS and kernel wouldn't be surprising.
This is marketing B.S. 101 to incite debate about what will and will not be the market leaders, in years to come.
At the rate Red Hat is "penetrating the markets" let's revisit this in say 10 years and I can be very confident that Red Hat will be in a world of hurt when it comes to competition.
OS X will make sure its the most secure, scalable and bare the crown Emperor Ease of Use--Innovate or Die is Steve's Motto.
What bothers me is the behemoth in this, Microsoft, gets to chuckle as its competition seems to be beating each other up.
But under the UI, Mac OS X is significantly more Unix than Windows XP, 2k, and NT.
You're misusing an extreme to prove the moderate.
Just because Windows isn't a Unix, but it has a shell, then Mac OS X isn't a Unix, despite it having a shell.
Between those points though, if you were to plot BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP on a Unix chart? Mac OS X would cluster much closer to BSD than to Windows XP, and Linux might actually fall in between OS X and BSD.
Cladistcally, OS X *is* a Unix. Trademark wise it isn't.
Cladistics however point out that Windows is not a Unix.
Cladistics defined!
Jobs begat NeXT, which used a Mach-derived kernel that was begat from Carnegie Mellon, and itself begat DEC Unix, and is the basis for Hurd.
NeXT then incorporated BSD, which itself was begat from AT&T Unix! Thus strengthened, NeXT was then ported into multiple platforms and begat OpenStep, which could claim in it's heritage the code from BSD-AT&T and from Mach-CMU.
OpenStep has begat Darwin and Mac OS X, which leads us to today.
Windows XP claims as it's progenitors Windows 2k, Windows NT, and OS/2. It too uses Mach, so there *is* a point of commonality between the two OSes.
GPL Deconstructed
Once upon a time, OSDL stepped up to the plate to "certify" what it means to be "UNIX". But that was based on the now outdated assumption that UNIX certification is of interest. Linux, OSX, et. al., even AIX, are not even trying for UNIX certification as it is of no particular value. BSD's certification is out of inheritance, not from any need to be. "Unix" as a standard is clearly dead, but does anyone really care besides OSDL and maybe SCO?
I can understand that there may be differences in terms of legality, codebase, etc. But to users, even programmers, they are all essentially the same.
I get annoyed when journalists repeat this shit, who not knowing the similarities, think they're different. But I get downright pissed when people in the tech world doesn't seem to know this either.
Trust me, as far as I'm concerned, they're the same.
...to use the trademark. Hence they don't use the name Unix. Hence people talk about the stuff that does use the name Unix as Unix.
Death of UNIX(tm). Linux, *BSD, and others look pretty healthy to me. Solaris isn't dead yet, but SCO/SVR4 can and will take a flying leap.
Don't you mean engulf and devour?
Heisenberg may have been here.
Yes! in one of the coroporate bigwig's conference, an ex-head of Red Hat India had introduced himself as a representative from Red Hat who sell Unix!
Few years back Mr. Javed Tapia Head of Red Hat in India after RH 8 was released announced that Linux's time has come! and now he too has started using it!!
Other time when he was interviewed by Businessworld he likened the success story of Linux to what he called 'roaches-under-the-board theory'!
He said, "Cockroaches multiply because typically they're under a board and no one cares what happens below the board. One day when you lift the board and look, there are a few million of them waiting to get out. By the time you get around to swatting them, most escape. That's pretty much what happened with Linux, chuckles Tapia. "Microsoft ignored us for too long. Thank God for that."A friend of mine who runs a training center told me that when contacted Red hat India for details to be Red Hat Training Partner, they mailed back a MS Word Document typed in MS Word!
I didn't believe it first and I contacted a friend who had recently joined RH India when I asked him if they used Windows in RH India ? He confirmed it! it seems they use windows in Mumbai(Bombay) Nariman Point Office!
A piece of advice to Red Hat people reading this comment:
Friends! whatever nice stuff does your developers and artists do, in no matter of time your marketing team (atleast in India) will ruin all your efforts!
Please employ someone who enjoys linux(like Biju Chacko, developer of XFCE whom you've recently employed) not someone because he just done his MBA in Harvard or some other BIG university!
You people are doing a bit of sales in India because of the community! definitely not because of most of your marketing fools!
Small computers are not the only boxes that run an OS. The clueless don't know about the mainframe OS like MVS and VM. IBM products. They probabily never heard of IBM. These OS are used by large corporations like the airline, insurance, oil, and financial industries. They were also built with security in mind.
Heisenberg may have been here.
You see the ring??? Bell Labs "died" / became Lucent, and their logo looks much like that fatal "ring" thing.
What? Like *all of you* never posted a flame?
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
What does your deployment of Linux have to do with Unix?
:-)
Nothing, if you have your filters set high enough
Otherwise, you'd see an insane level of flame headed toward RH, and my complacent adaptation of their OS to fit business needs.
UNIX is sorta croaked though dude, or I wouldn't be whomping major $ from using *nix instead. And don't give me that MCPU arguemnt, 2.6 handles at least 8 pretty damn well.
grovelling thanx to Linus!
System/3! System/3!
See how it runs! See how it runs!
Its monitor loses so totally!
It runs all its programs in RPG!
It's made by our favorite monopoly!
System/3!
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Will this type of aurgument ever die? Thats the only thing I hope WILL die.
Will this type of argument ever die? That's the only thing I hope WILL die.
Unix/Linux/BSD: Won't die
Windows: Has already died. It's onto NT technology now.duh.
Mac: Will always be around, and will continue to SELL patches as new Versions of their current OS.
The only thing that is dead is the X86 instruction set. Sheesh.