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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."
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!
and for a little walk through memory lane The UNIX Story. Also also lets not forget MS UNIX, Xenix IIRC
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OSX is not Unix. It's not even a BSD, really. It's OpenStep, which is cocoa, mach, etc. etc. The BSD subsystem runs in the same address space as mach for performance reasons, but OSX is not running a BSD kernel. Get a mac, install NetBSD or OpenBSD (or even Linux), run dmesg, and compare it to the dmesg output of Darwin, and you'll see the difference.
Don't get me wrong, I love OSX. But calling it Unix is a bit misleading.
I apply the duck test. If it looks like Unix, acts like Unix, etc, then it's Unix. Of course, it's X Windows plus the GNU tools that make Linux look/quack/swim like Unix.
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Really? I just consider it one of the many forms. Most of the UNIX installations are high end hardware. IBM for example hinted that AIX will be replaced with Linux for its RS/6k line.
Read deeper.
From the article: "Over time, Linux and Intel and Windows will catch up to where we were yesterday (with AIX). When they catch up, we'll be two steps down the road."
Big render farms are a small portion of the market. The web is still just a playground for most. MOST companies do "real" business like...
Paying their employees
Purchasing and procurement
Decision support services
Marketing, planning and data analysis
Selling their products
etc...
For these types of services, companies need the stability and support of the commercial unices, and they are willing to pay for it.
My wife (a militant non-geek History postgrad) has no difficulty in coping with Gnomeish interfaces on a Slackware box I set up for her. (And how many Windows users install their own OSs?)
I even heard her gloating the other day to a friend who had been bitten by the virus du jour that since she runs Linux it didn't affect her...
Heh. And who said Linux wasn't ready for the desktop?
A conventional monolithic kernel which enforces security policy, and governs basically everything from networking to disk access....yeah, that's pretty much part of Unix. OSX doesn't have that.
They call it SFU now...
No, it does not. Windows XP *is* Windows NT - 5.1 - and the only "progenitor" it could conceivably claim is VMS. OS/2 and NT are not related. They have nothing architecturally in common (except generic features like multitasking and multithreading and even then, NT is a superset of OS/2). They don't look, use, smell or taste even remotely similar. Cladistically, as you would say, they are not related.
The only connections between them are a) Microsoft worked on both, b) NT was originally supposed to be the successor to OS/2 and c) NT has (had ?) a subset of the OS/2 API as one of its "personalities". NT and OS/2 are about as related as NT and *nix.