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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."
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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. --
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?
At last someone mentions hardware! Unix is just a good system to run on big machines. I don't think the unix vendors care that your print server runs MS windows. They do care that your 16 cpu, 128GB RAM, 6 TB disks system runs some form of unix. All unix vendors sell expensive big harware and some form of integration. That's where the money is for them, not the system.
And these big systems are far from dying as far as I can see. We generate much more data than Moore's law and algorithms can cope with and if anything, the trend is accelerating. So if, one day, I see a 1024 cpu machine (a la SGI) runnning some for of MS windows, then I'll worry about Unix dying, not before.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
If any of those systems are a form of Unix, then a monkey is in fact a horse.