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Windows Beat Unix, But it Won't Beat Linux
Onymous Hero writes "The amazing thing isn't that Windows beat the pants off Unix; it's that so many of the Unix companies survived until today. An article from eWeek looks at why Linux has been so successful where Unix failed." From the article: "While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
And it won't for one simple reason. Its open source and free. Time and time again people say that Linux won't be able to last another year against Windows, and time and time again Linux is still here and stronger than ever. It is for one simple reason. It will last so long as people still have an interest in it and keep developing for it. Theoretically, Linux could last forever against Microsoft because there will always be people who don't want to buy into them. And there will always be people who want software for free and be able to modify their software. We could sit at 24 million Linux users for the next century and be fine. Still using Linux? (version 8.6.12-ac3) You bet I am.
From TFA:Hold on a second...according to Ulrich Drepper, the LSB was fundamentally broken.
(Note: see the Slashdot discussion regarding Ulrich's assertions here.
If Ulrich is on target, LSB, far from being the saving grace of Linux, could well be its downfall.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
the Unix businesses couldn't agree on software development standards
Oh, and Linux can?
Why is it that for Linux to succeed Microsoft must fail and vice versa? Surely there's room for both of them in the market and competition is a healthy thing to prevent stagnation. No one looks for ATi to destroy Nvidia or wants Sony to put Nintendo out of the market so why the constant desire to see Microsoft fail? I actually like a lot of what Microsoft is trying to acheive with its next round of software. At the same time I love the progress made by Debian, Ubuntu, E17 etc. one spurs the other. If Microsoft fails surely thats bad for the American economy and in the long term means less jobs for people like ourselves, it's almost like wishing another Katrina on yourselves, doesn't make much sense to me.
" Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?"
Now how does that make sense? Microsoft didn't meet anyone elses standards either. If anything even though the Unix guys didn't exactly pull it off, they still did a better job meeting standards than Microsoft. The truth is they were all doing their own thing, just MS managed to sell enough to get the userbase it needed to make developing for their platform a no-brainer.
In short, it wasn't Windows standards compliance or lack thereof that made them win, Windows won in spite of it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
From the article:
The second advantage was it had Linus Torvalds.
There are other open-source Unix operating systems: the BSDs.
None of them, though, have had even a fraction of Linux's success.
Because Torvalds is the single leader of Linux, it has avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting, which continues to bedevil the BSDs.
Excuse me? Sure, there is in-fighting among the BSDs, but there is certainly more in-fighting and more competition among the Linux distributions.
For instance, the ports/packages of OpenBSD is inspired by FreeBSD's, while NetBSD's pkgsrc has been selected by DragonFlyBSD. OpenSSH, from OpenBSD, has been adopted by both FreeBSD and NetBSD (not to mention countless other OS) and pf has also been imported into FreeBSD and NetBSD. And so on and so forth. That does not sound like in-fighting to me.
So... in-fighting? Sure, there is competition between the BSDs, and a fair amount of sniping and name-calling, but I don't think this is worse (or better) than the in-fighting between the different Linux distributions.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
1. Most Unix operating systems ran on proprietary hardware only. NT could be installed on cheap hardware you could buy from a store.
2. The exception was SCO Unix. But SCO treated it exclusively as a high-end product, so it didn't end up on desktops.
3. No serious push was made to put Unix on the desktop. As a result, Microsoft was able to sell NT as an operating system that the majority of system administrators were familiar with, as opposed to Unix where almost nobody had it on their desktops.
If these issues had been knocked on the head, Unix might have stood a chance. As for "rival" versions all making different decisions, who gives a crap? So "Unix" wasn't one operating system, but several: if it was five different operating systems, then it had five chances to be successful. Any one of them could have succeeded and changed the market. None of them did, not because they were rivals, but because they all had at least one major flaw as documented above:
- AIX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- Solaris might have been successful had it been available for x86 (before Linux) and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- HPUX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- DEC Tru64 might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
Whether, of course, it would have been capable of being properly pushed, given Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop market in the early nineties, is open to question.What the summary documents is a nonsense and ignores the real issues. Arguing that AUX didn't succeed because it competed with Solaris would be like arguing MSDOS didn't succeed because it competed with CP/M. The fact all of these operating systems shared a brandname does not mean they didn't independently fail. They may have failed for the same reasons, but they didn't fail because they were all slightly different yet had a brandname and some code in common. That's ridiculous.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
As a previous poster pointed out, we have been told again and again, that Linux has been on the path of destruction.
While I am a c++ fan, i don't see the advantage of a C++ gui API. Furthermore, while it may seem huge to you, we only have two main GUI API on linux. They are even mostly crossplatform now. Plus you know that by choosing either one of them it will run on your linux box, as both GTK and QT are installed.
As for the media framework, i guess you haven't been following it very well, but to my knowledge, we can say we have three major one on Linux: Mplayer, Xine and finally my favorite GStreamer. While initially Gstreamer was Gnome, it is one becoming a major player (pun almost intented) in KDE. Amarok uses it quite well. Furthermore, they have from what i understand an almost functionnal version for Windows, making it crossplatform too.
Choice doesn't create chaos. What creates chaos is when you are stupid to make a good choice, and that you are gloating that your choice is valid because you picked it. Choice push to competition. Plus, i would prefer choice, than a single road finishing with a wall at the end.
I don't really if Linux beats Windows, or the reverse, as long as I have the choice to work on a consistent platform Linux or Windows. It all adds up to what is better for you.
History says that if you build an app for Solaris first and that gains marketshare, then maybe it might be worthwhile to port it to other Unices if the development and porting costs can be recouped with sales and support. Linux has been changing that somewhat, but I'd still wager that most development houses that write for a Unix market almost always have Solaris as a primary platform.
As to why you'd do this (and to some extent, this is still valid), it's because Unices provide a stable, well-mature platform for apps and are capable of more processing power than your typical Windows system -- all desirable traits for an application that people are going to depend on. People use Windows because the time-to-market for development is typically shorter than that of Unix development, mostly due to the fact that 95% of the world can write an app on their Windows desktop and copy it to a Windows server platform without modification. Doesn't mean it's good code or a well-thought out development strategy, but it's an enabling technique that keeps Windows development prevalent in IT.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Good grief what bull - anyone would think you've never been able to write large scale single source apps until you ship on one platform (Linux, Windows or the Mac, choose one). Between 1990 and 1994 I worked for Laser Scan (out of business for about a year now) www.laserscan.co.uk. We wrote GIS systems for VMS and 6 Unix platforms. All single source, in C, using X11 and Motif with Oracle I think, using object based code (the GNU C++ compiler wasn't up to much in 1990 when we had to choose). There was I think one header file with the few platform specific things in (like missing macros on Solaris) etc. I can't remember how many lines of code, but I think about the 1 million line mark, excluding comments. 11 years is a long time to try to remember that stuff.
But single source - that is the majority of your headache gone right there. Which leads to the next FALSE assertion:
Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Write a single App for VMS and six competing Unix vendors from single source - why thats the same as write an app for seven different Linux vendors from single source. You STILL have the seven unique quality assurance and support problems because each distribution will be different.
It would be nice to assume that because you built it on RedHat it will run on Suse. Maybe it will most of the time. But will it always? And when it does not, will the cause necessarily always be the same when it fails on Linux vendor #2 compared to failing on Linux vendor #4? Maybe, Maybe not, that is the question, for alas quality assurance and support did not exist when he wrote plays in Stratford upon Avon.
Still, I'm sure the informed journo that wrote that article has a nice pay cheque.
May I suggest you tell Apple that "MacOS X is not Unix"?
According to you tf Apple site:
"Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation..."
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/
Luckily I commented on you so that I am not tempted to mod you overrated.
Wether you call BSD dead or not, I don't care, I just use what works the best for me, sometimes it is windows sometimes it is Mac other times it is bsd. I tried linux but I am more experienced with BSD's.
"Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
.INIs, then some .INIs and half a registry, then Win32s, Win32, then Win 9x and the registry, then NT, it's unique registry, then running 16 bit in 32 via thunk and later WoW, ad nauseum! Then, its C, then VB, then, Visual, then VB + VC++, whatever...
.dll, then VxDs, then .NET,...
Development, installation and running on multiple MS platforms was NEVER easy: how quick everyone forgets...
In Win 3.x installation was text files, then
Never mind the network. Monolithic, NDIS, NDISII, II(?), Netbios/NETBEUI, then Bill Gates invented the Internet and IP, then broken IP stacks....
Then COM, COM+, ADO, then AD, then....
Then this
MS Easy to Develop and maintain for, and runs on all machines my Rear.
The economics were: DOS==FREE (forced bundling) -- XENIX $400
When you have 1 or 2 machines, this is not too much of a problem. However, when you plan on deploying 20 or 100 or 1000 machines, this $400 adds up very fast. Management balks....
In the early '90's, we had to pay EXTRA to Dell to get 486 PCs without DOS and Windows. So the cost was EVEN HIGHER. Management would look at the cost of XENIX (or other UNIXs which were comparable) and ask why you could not do it with DOS. As a result a lot of extra, unpaid OT happened to write executives and multi-taskers for DOS when XENIX/UNIX would have been an ideal fit!
Another factor is price elasticity of demand -- lower price, more demand, higher price, less demand. DOS=FREE (or even $29) versus XENIX $400 -- now which would management let you purchase or design into your product? Concurrent (?) UNIX was $99 and it was an option, but not widely supported. It has taken FREE versions of UNIX/UNIX-like O/Ss (Free BSD, LINUX) to change the market dynamics -- it is hard to compete with FREE and with FORCED BUNDLING.
No middle manager gave a rat's ass about the difficulty of porting to different vesions of UNIX. Certainly the effort to port a UNIX app to Windows and retrain all those programmers was far greater than merely adding a few IFDEFs to existing code. UNIX lost just as squiggleslash says. When time came to add a simple print server or file, managers said, Whoa, I can add a cheap Windows commodity system, or I can buy an expensive UNIX box that has to go in the dataceneter with special power and cooling requirements. As for who would admin the damn thing, since none of the UNIX guys would touch it, the answer was as simple as Microfoft's ad campaign, why the manager would, it's a GUI, what could be simpler?
UNIX ignored cheap systems, everyone knew the money was in the big boxes, and as for the desktop, that was an insignificant market to be sniffed at. No serious vendor paid attention to desktops, only (sniff) Microsoft and their toy operating system.
Infuriate left and right
However, if Linux wins and Microsoft loses, there are still N-1 companies competing in the OS market, where the -1 is the loss of Microsoft. So still (almost) as much competition as before, and it's still good for everyone.
I want NVidia and ATi both to succeed as while they are both there, there is real competition. Linux doesn't work that way, it's not a good analogy.
That's the beauty of the GPL. It's all in the licence, stupid.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Linux bigotry blinds these folks from reality. Unix vendors such as sun sgi et al, were hardware vendors NOT unix vendors. They prospered because in the 1980's through 1990's they kept their high margin hardware 5 years more advanced than the commodity priced PC market. Example, a Sun Ultra2 had 4.3GB/s memory bandwidth when the best PC's had 512MB/s.
The "workstation" companies began to fail when they could not maintain this technology lead. Why pay Sun's margins for the same basic hardware you can get from the local whitebox shop? Unix and windows don't enter in to it.
IT is shifting from expensive big iron to throw away whitebox clusters.
Linux will succeed because it allows consumers to further commoditize the cost the computing for companies that have the staff to build and maintain their own OSS distributions (Google?). For companies that cannot do this and have to purchase Linux support contracts, its generally equal to or more expensive than Windows.
I think you are missing the point. Getting your software to build on two platforms is about 10% of the total problem.
/bin/sh as the default user shell and the other user /bin/bash. And those two shells don't work the same way. And a solaris user might well expect the program to be installed in /opt, while the linux sysadmin might well want it in /usr/local. And what if the program relies on the system cron to schedule things. You think Linux and Solaris cron work _exactly_ the same way?
Think of all the surrounding stuff:
1. Manuals
2. Installation
3. Interfaces to other parts of the OS
So what if your code compiles on Solaris and Linux. If you want to support both, you will need to write a Solaris package and an RPM package. And one system uses
It's not straightforward.
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don't mess with those geekgrrls
I worked on a C code base that spanned several UNIX systems (the standard ones and wierder ones like AIX or IRIX). It also ran on MPE and VAX systems.
Let me tell you, there were a LOT of ifdefs going on to deal with vagaries in the size of an int, byte ordering, even memory management.
You seem to claim that POSIX gives you just as good cross-platform abilities as a system like Java or Python. But that is simply false; at best Posix is only an order of magnitude worse in terms of testing across systems that is required to be done compared to a cross-platform language like Java.
One reason for this (at least in the case of Java) is a really rigorous set of tests that help ensure to what degree Java will do the same thing across platforms. Posix is not as well defined as Java to start with, and as a result simply cannot be tested as throughly to insure a similar level of behavoral similarilty across systems.
The common Joke with Java is that you "Write Once, Test Everywhere". But in my extensive practical experience I have seen no code changes required to easily develop day-to-day Java across Windows, Solaris, and Linux. There is NO WAY if I were writing POSIX C code I would be as comfortable just writing on Windows or Linux and then deploying straight to Solaris.
Java has moved out the bits that you really do need to "test everywhere" out much further on the fringes of coding than C has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You do have to write a different version of your app for every version of Windows. OK, maybe it's not 6, but there are massive differences between Windows 98 and, say, Windows 2000. Windows XP represents another, albeit less disruptive, set of changes. Windows Vista will probably represent the biggest set of changes yet. Each of these is a development target, with its own QA requirements and so on.
I've worked on software that had to be supported on HPUX, AIX, Solaris, and yes even SCO's crappy UNIX. There were notable differences and QA requirements, but the differences between the Windows branches are much more significant.
Windows won for one reason. It was pretty, so you could trick people into learning how to use it. Well that, and people had windows computers at home, and they brought that skillset with them to job interviews.
It can't beat Linux because Linux doesn't have stockholders to answer to. And it's losing share to Linux in direct proportion to the degree to which Linux is getting prettier.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.