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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
Indeed, we must speak carefully when discussing "the death of Unix". Do we mean "Unix(tm)", or "Unix and all that other stuff that looks pretty much just like it"? The former could indeed be killed off by the remainder of the latter; the latter group still has a long future IMHO.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
Last time I checked, Solaris was losing market share rapidly to Linux. Dunno how much of that is to Red Hat Linux, but we can surmise a fair amount.
May we never see th
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. --
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?
It appears RedHat is now gradually withdrawing from the Linux market it has created. Nothing else can explain a firm disowning the greatness of it's own offerings.
Like MS, which recently proclaimed the death of Open Source, RedHat is now claiming the death of Unix. Better to ignore these chaps.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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)
IRIX?
Solaris?
When/where do you need these OS's anymore?
AIX: too many uses to list - most notably, on their larger servers. Also, when you want 5 9's or better.
IRIX: good question ;)
Solaris: Solaris is still *leagues* better than linux, for nearly anything. Large database servers, for example. Sun E15k's. Etc.
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.
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
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?
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...
People lose sight of something in the battle between Linux and *OS, though. Linux is MEANT to be a UNIX clone, so it's major target is still UNIX. The whole idea that it's being used to attack Windows is sort of silly, actually. It certainly does make a good Windows replacement on the server for systems that need a wider range of or more robust tools, but part of the reason it isn't a good desktop solution yet is that it's not really meant to go head to head with Windows that way. They're too distinct systems, UNIX and Windows, and Linux tries to be UNIX, only better. There are, of course, a lot of people working to make it ready to go head to head on the desktop, and it's gaining ground, but the reason we're playing "catch up" to Windows is, again, because that wasn't the original target.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Since when has the flavor of kernel determined if something is unix or not?
Then again, Unix could be to operating systems what Latin is to languages. It's a basis for other OS's to work from, but proprietary Unix itself will not be used directly.
If any of those systems are a form of Unix, then a monkey is in fact a horse.
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.
A modest proposal:
UNIX: the AT&T-derived code
Unix: the other stuff
It's easier than MB/s and Mb/s.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They weren't direct copies, no, but they were definately derivitave. Just as all modern cars are derivitave of Ford's Model-T, so too are all modern OSes derivitave of UNIX. The resembelance is faint sometimes, but its there.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003