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."

Comments

Which Unix?

[wiredog]

Linux is, essentially, Unix. So are the various flavors of BSD.

And then there is the newest Unix on the block, a BSD variant, known as OS X. A User Friendly Unix.

Re:Which Unix?

[idiotnot]

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.

Re:Which Unix?

[mwood]

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.

Wrong strategy

[KamuSan]

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.

Re:Wrong strategy

[KamuSan]

No, MS sucks as a company, but it's products are ok
(read: good enough).

The whole problem with MS is that it doesn't compete on quality, or price, but it sells through vendor lock-in (read: through the nose).
MS has a broad product suite, where each product has hooks into their other products. If you buy product X, then you need product Y, or it only really really works nice with product Z. And the more products you buy, the more you need to buy their other products.

The main vector for this extremely contagious MS disease are their OSes. Their OSes are the bait in 'bait, hook and switch'.

So, if you think you can compete with MS by providing a better product, and you think that more competition will provide this better product, think again. MS doesn't compete by providing better products, it just grows it's market share and then let their weight do the work. The only way to compete with MS is to prevent them from growing their market share too much. And if you just concentrate on competing with other Unices, then you (and the other Unices) will lose, because behind your back MS will eat the total Un*x-likes market share.

Look at it from a PHB point of view. Say that there is a 75% market share of Un*x-likes and a 25% market share of Windows-likes (which is in effect 25% for Windows itself).
What OS would you choose, an OS with a 25% market share in a fragmented market of total 75%, that means 18.75% of the total market, or an OS with 25% of the total market? Let alone that the position of this last OS will be perceived as more stable, because there is so much turmoil in the Un*x-like market.

It's just like a bad TV commercial...

[dpbsmith]

"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!"

Taking a moment for clarification.

[fireboy1919]

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.

Re:Taking a moment for clarification.

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Use Unix. Use Linux. Then just try to tell the difference. I've been there; there's essentially no different from a user's point of view.

Re:Taking a moment for clarification.

[Loconut1389]

i think we're talking two different levels. There's the OS, then there's tools. Shell scripting may seem like a basilar activity, but its really not a part of the operating system's core, which seems to define whether something is UNIX or not.

Now, given that GNU stuff is available everywhere, UNIX therefore -has- those capabilities if installed, just like anything else (Linux or otherwise). UNIX has not 'moved with the demands' as you say because those features have already been implemented, why reinvent the wheel, just install an rpm/pkg/whathaveyou.

since when does having X windows, or a particular app have any bearing on whether the os you're running is technically a UNIX, a Linux, a NeXT, a windows, etc system?

So if I ran DOS with Norton Commander installed, its not dos anymore because i installed something non-standard?

Anyway, IMHO, i dont think its a matter of 'switching to GNU', its simply 'using GNU'. Heck, even cygwin on windows can use GNU stuff for the most part. Installing GNU utilities on your windows box does not make it a unix.

Come to think of it, that may be the prime example. Cygwin looks like a unix, walks like a unix etc, to quote another poster, but its the kernel that really defines what the system technically is.

Unix is dead, long live unix

[StrawberryFrog]

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.

UNIX is a philosophy

[peter303]

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.

Let me arrange this

[ArmenTanzarian]

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.

OSX isn't Unix?

[DesScorp]

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.