Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.