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SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production
ramakant writes "Considering the recent news regarding their dismal financial situation, it should come as no surprise that SGI announced end of production for MIPS based hardware and the IRIX operating system. From the article: "SGI launched the MIPS/IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006." IRIX has always been my favored OS, and I'll be sad to see it gone. Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come."
Irix itself wan't that much worse than any other *nix of the same time period, but none of the varied tools, 3D bells & whistles that SGI bolted on were designed with security in mind. The only way to avoid getting hacked into was to remove it all before connecting it to the net, but once you removed it there was little point in buying one.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I always remember talking to some vendor at a usenix conference a few years after the birth of IRIX. We were talking about the relative benefits of SunOS (Solaris as it is now) versus IRIX. The guy said that using IRIX compared to SunOS was like riding a motorbike compared to driving a car. "It's fast, it's a rush, it's more fun than you can possibly imagine - but it's easy to fall off - and when you do it hurts a lot more!"...that pretty much says it all.
I spent a large fraction of my most productive years sitting in front of a million dollar computer with IRIX in my face. It was pretty good - but with SGI's market share shrinking and Linux getting so mature, it makes sense for them to dump the hideous cost of maintaining an entire OS by themselves. For SGI, it's a good decision in desperate times.
We split from using SGI to off-the-shelf PC/Linux about 5 years ago - about as soon as nVidia's graphics got good enough for our needs. A PC costs about 1% of an SGI with similar horsepower...QED.
As for MIPS, the equation is the same one Apple had to face down. Performance = Horsepower per CPU / Price per CPU -- and whilst your own solution can win on horsepower, you can't beat the price of whatever is made in the largest quantities...and it's the same deal as with IRIX - when you have to cut costs, designing your own CPU isn't the smart way to go.
Sad - but inevitable.
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I'm not sure where the logic for something like this comes from. Like there is an infinite ammount of people who will work on every project ever abandoned. If IRIX was so wildly popular, I doubt SGI would stop working on it. I'm sure there's lots of useful code in there, but I'm also sure it's littered with stuff that has a patent on it as well. SGI is still a company that seeks to survive (I would assume), and isn't doing so well. They are in no position to work on figuring out licence issues to put IRIX under the GPL.
Well this is the first of the old school Unix's to fall that I can think of. AIX and Solaris will probably be last. The ones maintained by Hewlet-Compaqard will be next in line after the death of SCO derivatives.
Um, at least Solaris makes great efforts to make sure that an application that runs on Solaris.X will be able to be transfered seemlessly to Solaris.X+1. Thats one of the reasons there's all this legacy staff lying aroung in various directories. If you look at Solaris man pages, there's usually a note about whether the interface is stable and whether it will remain in the next releases. Even the output of commands tends to be relatively stable across releases. And of course there are cases of drivers (for example network cards) that are compatible across Solaris.8,9,10 because they were written according to the guidelines. Even the migration to 64 bits (on SPARC) has been done a decade ago. So, if you invest on it, chances are that your software will probably be able to be transfered unchanged to the next version, when it is around.
Linux is great, don't take me wrong, but in what way your intellectual investment is safe, when the entire landscape is in continuous flux? I mean, APIs are changing back and forth, kernel modules come and go across minor kernel releases, each distro has its favorite places where commands and files are placed. Not to mention the 32 to 64 bit migration which is in a terrible mess. This is not MHO, read July's Linux Journal editorial and laugh about it.
The truth is, I don't think you are not interested in any kind of intellectual investment, you are just betting on a horse because someone told you that in the end there can be only one. Well, guess what, "they" 've been saying the same since 1985, and today there is still Windows,Linux,all the BSDs,Solaris,AIX,HPUX etc etc. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and, really, it is great to have such a diverse ecology.
(Although I may have sounded harsh throughout the post, I want to stress that this is all just friendly advice -- kind regards)