Slashdot Mirror
The Steady Decline of Unix
stinkymountain writes "Unix, the core server operating system in enterprise networks for decades, now finds itself in a slow, inexorable decline, according to Network World. Jean Bozman, research vice president at IDC Enterprise Server Group, attributes the decline to platform migration issues; competition from Linux and Microsoft; more efficient hardware with more powerful processor cores; and the abundance of Unix-specific apps that can now also run on competitor's servers."
So the bulk of Unix's decline comes from competing *nixes, in particularly Linux.
News at 11.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Huh?
How long has Netcraft been confirming BSD dead?
The real news is that Unix is still used in industry.
... Linux isn't Unix.
Wat? Replacing a Unix server with Windows boxes? Srsly? Sounds like a stupid idea, especially if you factor in admin costs.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
If OS X is Unix, what do you call iOS. And if we take Linux as a kind of Unix, how about Android? Or maybe the title should be written as "the steady decline of Unix Server License sale"
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
What if we re-wrote it in "D"?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Gotta be some metric boost there, right?
The distinction betwen "Linux" and "UNIX" is virtually meaningless. All of the traditional proprietary unixen are massively customized from the original System V/System 7 sources over the past thirty years -- such that it's hard to say that they have a common core even. The only real difference is a marketing difference.
So, say it with me!
Meh.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The article completely neglects the fact that OS X is a fully certified Unix, and, whilst OS X might not be overly popular in the server market, it certainly has a very large percentage of the desktop market. So yeah, perhaps the old-school companies that provide Unix OSes for servers may be in their 'last days', but Apple's OS X has brought Unix to the masses via the desktop, so Unix certainly isn't going to die any day soon.
One can get Linux or *BSD on commodity hardware for a fraction of the cost.
Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner, concurs that the primary cause of Unix weakness over the past decade is migration from the RISC platform to x86-processor based alternatives, which can run many Unix workloads, usually at attractive price/performance ratios.
x86 has been implemented on a RISC based core ever since the PentiumPro. RISC won. It didn't wither away. That transition made possible a performance boost allowing Intel to compete against the home-grown processors of the traditional Unix vendors who lacked the cash to invest in fab advancements needed to match pace.
Such are the fools pandering their vaunted "analysis" to the media these days.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
If you include Linux, *NIX is the most common OS in the world by now. Its in every iPad, iPhone, Android phone, every wireless router I know of, every Mac, every top500 computer, many servers (web, email, etc), all of Google's machines, I'm guessing most all of Yahoo's machines, etc, etc.
Sure, Windows has a margin in the desktop, but when my aging parents have over 50% of the computers in their home as *NIX machines (3/5 to be exact) and they don't even know what *NIX is, I think that says something.
"Unix" - as they define it - is going away. But what's really happening is that old implementations of Unix are being replaced by modern implementations and re-implementations of Unix.
Servers are increasingly using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. On the client side, the #1 smartphone (by popularity) is Android, based on Linux. The #2 smartphone is iOS, based on Unix. On the desktop, Macs are running MacOS, also based on Unix.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Neckbeard teasing? Or what?
Unix (in some incarnation) is running the world. It runs on servers, on embedded systems and basically all tablets and smartphones (both Android and iOS are Unix).
I cannot believe I'm wasting 30 seconds on this. Die, Slashdot, die.
Unix over. so sad.
This is just about semantics, copyright, and trademark issues. UNIX is more than a trademark, a brand, a product, or a license. UNIX is a set of standards, a set of design ideas, and a broader philosophy that transcends the constant evolution of such things. Linux is very well within the umbrella of what UNIX really means, and is arguably now the front-running champion of the modern incarnations of the UNIX philosophy of computing. That the older / commercial UNIX variants are dying is expected: this is how natural selection works, and it's beautiful that the market of UNIXy things is one that's free enough for natural selection to take place.
So no, UNIX isn't dying. Some old flavors of UNIX are slowly passing away in favor of a new flavor. Linux has evolved from asking questions 15-20 years ago about "Can we be POSIX compliant and be compatible with existing to UNIX" to the current status of "We are the de-facto reference implementation of the POSIX standards".
So what they are saying is that the old-timer Unix(tm) types of unix (including Solaris/SunOS, AIX (IBM unix), BSD (University of California Berkeley Software Distribution unix), UnixWare, SantaCruseOperation Unix, HPUX (Hewlett Packard Unix), NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Nextstep, Ultrix, DecUnix, CLIX (Intergraph Unix), Xenix (microsoft Unix), are dying off, while new-timer types of unix (iOS, OSX Apple unix, which are heavily derived from BSD unix), (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, ChromeOS and Android which are all based on Linux, which was independently developed to operate in a unix-like way and just follows POSIX standards) and other new-timer unix-like operating systems are gaining in popularity. Hmmm. I see.
...that SCO will want more money for those companies/systems still using it to make up for lost revenue that they're not entitled to?
An interesting hypothesis, but what all of slashdot is waiting to hear is: does Netcraft confirm it?
This guy seems to be blissfully unaware that FreeBSD is Unix. With Apple selling millions of handsets, Unix is obviously not in decline. Just squeezed out from one role (by Linux) and taking on a new one.
Obviously, this might change in the future, but from the moment, Unix is doing to opposite of declining. Troll article. If there is a story in there somewhere, it is the rise of Linux in the server room.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My experience was on AT&T Unix System V. I used to jokingly refer to it as REAL UNIX with a hint of faux snobbery and a straight face.
While working on a Linux system, I was using some command line utility (doesn't matter) and the command kept wrapping. Ran it - errors. Retyped - errors. Retyped - finally worked.
Anyway, a skilled Linux user was watching me, typing away and then running my command - the syntax worked like it was a AT&T System V UNIX, BTW.
Said Linux dude said, try this - and he proceed to do the same thing with the same program but with like one or two flags and then the args.
It worked.
There have been quite a few time savers (I won't call them improvements) built into Linux.
I can't blame them - some of the most common things that we did in Sys V were overly verbose.
Anyway, wanted to share that - gotta go; there's a Matlock marathon and it's Pizza and Banana pudding night! Betsy has got the hots for me and she so young - 68! I'm gonna have a GOOD time tonight!
...but if you think about it, Unix-like, to include Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android, is on a meteoric rise. Especially in the ARM world.
Between OS-X, IOS and Android, this discussion is more than a little comical.
I was soooo glad when we finally decommissioned our last Solaris box. It's not that Unix got worse it's just the alternatives got better. Also the proprietary RISC based hardware underpinning much of commercialized Unix lost out to cheaper PC commodity stuff. Again, it's not that RISC sucked, it's the fact that the lazy proprietary paradigm couldn't figure out how to evolve past the "Screw, em. They're locked in. They _CANT_ switch" model.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The decline of UNIX is, among other things, attributed to "the abundance of Unix-specific apps that can now also run on competitor's servers."
There is this thing called GNU, which has the explicit goal to replace UNIX. So it is not that Unix-specific apps can only run on other systems, the whole system is replaced. And though largely backwards compatible, improved as well (and free of course).
"the abundance of Unix-specific apps" is killing Unix?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I've worked for quite a few banks and other types of multinationals and can assure you that AIX isn't disappearing any time soon.
Even though IBM are thoroughly supportive of Linux, they're smart enough to know that the multifarious spread of distros and inferior support / documentation is not going to damage their massive revenue streams in this area any time soon, according to the nobody ever got fired for buying IBM syndrome.
However for smaller companies Linux rules these days, especially the Red Hat and its' derivatives variety.
And isn't that a great thing, as the skillset is massively transferable between these worlds, although as a Unix / Liinux user for over 20 years I know that moving from a home Ubuntu enthusiast to a distributed file system / guaranteed failover top end system expert is going to involve a lot of new learning.
Think of them being complementary in a 'different horses for different courses' way and learn to see where the value of both lies rather than trying to set up a simplistic binary argument between two alternatives.
IDC Enterprise Server Group simply reported that revenue generated from the sale of commercial Unix is declining and IBM is overtaking HP in that segment of the market.
NetworkWorld took that little factoid and turned it into "The last days of Unix" article despite the fact that the actual article mentions Linux as being a competitor. I'm sure BSD is also taking a good chunk of market too.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Replacing HP/UX with Windows? Do they have any CPUs in common any more? It's only possible if one is replacing HP-9000s or Integrity servers with x64 servers from either HP themselves, or someone like IBM or Dell.
HP/UX only ran on PA-RISC previously, and now only runs on Itanium. Server 2008 did run on Itanium, but is no longer supported there: Server 2012 is a Wintel only platform. So if one wanted to replace HP/UX with Server 2012, then one would have to move out the Itanium servers, and bring in x64 servers as replacements. Long term, not a bad idea, but short term, it would be a major loss on the Integrity servers, which ain't cheap
The real decline is that the group that produced the source code product at AT&T was effectively disbanded in 1993 when AT&T sold off UNIX System Labs to Novell. Some of the slack was picked up by SUN, HP, and others, but in the past 20 years, none of the features and improvements that were planned--at the source code distribution level--ever happened.
The Steady Decline of Commercial Unix - FTFY
Most of the the big Unix vendors have either switched to Linux or offer Linux as an alternative (eg IBM). Apples OSX since Leopard has received official "Open Brand UNIX 03" certification. iOS is not mentioned and most likely is not certified as the certification is unnecessary. But iOS is still based on OSX which is Unix certified and before certification, Unix like. Open Solaris was the only truly open source Unix but Oracle put a stop to that. Now OpenIndiana and illumos have replaced them and I don't believe they can carry the Unix brand.
Unix like operating systems such as GNU/Linux, and to a lesser extent, BSD have replaced commercial Unix operating systems. They both provide two of the most critical parts of Unix: POSIX and X windows. From there many programs originally written for a major commercial Unix vendor be it IBM's AIX or SGI's IRIX can quickly be ported to Linux or BSD with minimal effort. Just look at what Linux can run on:
* Embedded systems with tens of MHz and a few megs of ram to the worlds largest supercomputers with thousands of nodes.
* Just about every every high powered ARM embedded electronics hobby board runs Linux such as the Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone UDOO and others.
* Linux is also pushing into hard real time markets previously dominated by QNX, LynxOS and VxWorks. National Instruments now has an ARM version of their CompactRIO running real-time Linux. Previously they used an embedded Power CPU from Freescale running VxWorks.
* The Linux kernel is the foundation for Android which is dominating the smartphone and tablet market.
"7%" is a HUGE number when it comes to market share in ANYTHING. Coca Cola's market share is also single digits in the soft drink market.
Kinda gives you some perspective on Windows market share, doesn't it.
Never mind the submitter, or Slashdot for even carrying this story.
Mod the Original Article as flamebait.
Whoever even bothered to write the article in the first place needs to lose his license to write tech journalism. Author is clueless. Sure, *pay-for* unixes are dying. HOWEVER, Free/Open Source Unixes are thriving.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
While true UNIXes are in decline (a true UNIX shares source-code with the original UNIX), clones (Linux) are very much alive and that is what counts. Even some true UNIXes (free/open/netBSD) are not doing too badly. There are even more interface-compatible systems that follow the UNIX philosophy. In a nutshell, the only "OS" today that is not UNIX-like and matters is the Windows isle of incompatibility.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As several people have already noted here, this story is essentially a lie, or at least an exaggeration. Linux (for all intents and purposes) *IS* Unix without the trademark. That is one of the reasons why Linux grew to be so popular. A large number of people wanted a Unix but didn't want to pay for it. Just because the operating systems that can legally be called Unix are shrinking in usage (with the notable exception of MacOS and it's close cousin iOS) does not mean that Unix is dead. Unix and that which would be called a Unix in a trademark-free world is alive and well and is exploding exponentially. It's in every pad computer, e-book readers, most smart phones, my Sony Blu-Ray player, airliner entertainment systems, and many, many other places I can't think of at the moment.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Once you could replace a Solaris box with 10 Linux boxes and the business finally believed Linux could run their business servers and not just the printer spooler the game was over. This started really happening 12+ years ago and continues to this day. The same goes for HP-UX, AIX, SCO, you name it. These machines were elegant, high performance devices in many cases (expect SCO) but they were unbelievably expensive. Some of the hardware was exotic such as the Digital Corp. and SGI hardware. Just as counting machines were displaced by Mainframes and Minicomputers, the Mainframes and AS400s were replaced with UNIX, and the UNIX machines will be replaced with x86 / Linux machine which may one day be throw out by ARM / Linux machines. It will not be unprecedented.
I have heard from many admins over the years that they loved the tools, loved the support, of the UNIX vendors but the reality is the cost. Google had no real desire to build their search technology on commodity gear but when you look at the scale and cost the math just doesn't add up to use anything else. This transition has only accelerated with VMware and the Intel and AMD chips with vitalization acceleration embedded, and commodity servers with staggering hardware performance. The market has matured, Linux is accepted, and the scale of deployment in virtual (cloud) environments makes total economic sense. The next step are other pieces of the infrastructure that I cannot commit on due to NDA. But it is coming very quickly.
In the Engineering CAD world, Unix has nearly run its course. All companies have dropped Unix support for the newest versions and only some maintain Linux/OSX versions for newer unix-like machines. Most are Windows only. Automotive companies, which are notoriously slow in technology adoption have mostly abandoned UNIX
Ford will retire their UNIX workstations (HPUX) for suppliers and customers in February 2014. These are largely HPUX 11.11i.
Unigraphics NX stopped UNIX support (HPUX, AIX, etc) as of NX 6 but opened support for Linux and OSX as of 8.
Dassault systems CATIA supported HPUX, AIX (6.1+) and Solaris on V5 - but as of V6 in 2011 they have ended UNIX support and are Windows only.
Pro Engineer quit most UNIX except Solaris until Pro Engineer / Creo 4.0 - at present they are Windows only.
Does it also imply that [2014;+INF[ contains no n such that n is the year of Linux on the desktop ?
msg-uuid: 57281495-F27D-49EA-AC5F-B7D8B895AAFB
Most ridiculous article ever.
Unix is running the world. There's a stupid, fragile, overpriced PC OS from some small indie software maker in some backwater place near Seattle, but everything else is Unix. Whether it's Linux, OS X, BSD, iOS, Android, or one of the surviving big Unix players, there's really not all that much out there that isn't a Unix.
Heck, even most of the RTOS are Unix or Unix-like these days. Gaming consoles seem to be the only area of computing not dominated by Unix. Funny, gaming is also the only reason I still have a Bootcamp partition. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'd hardly describe FreeBSD as dying off. Dunno about OpenBSD or NetBSD though
Official Unix might be nearly dead, meaning BSD's and commercial server variants. Linux is pushing them into oblivion, as are Apple's and Microsoft's systems.
Linux (systems built on top of the kernel) is alive and kicking. Maybe not on the desktop which has always been a holy grail for Linux enthusiasts (decentralized and chaotic development of desktop userspace and arcane packaging didn't help the matter...), but certainly in mobile and server space, as well as many other less visible domains.
the number of embedded systems running openbsd or netbsd (from everything from printer to elevator controllers) goes into the millions
so ubiquitous they're invisible
solaris ruined by oracle who even cares if it exists anymore, HP-UX has been a disaster longer than i have been alive, SCO decided to burry itself IRIX was too niche oriented.
UNIX isn't losing half the team didn't show up now they have to forfeit
Sure, pure UNIX use is declining on servers but OSX is UNIX based and that seems to be doing fine. Linux is too. I think that the decline of UNIX on servers is more about the architecture it is tied to rather than UNIX itself. Linux, of course, can run on Intel CPUs which tend to be much cheaper. UNIX has always been a rock solid OS in my experience and it will continue to live on, behind the scenes, for a long time to come.
Yet another Slashdot article that clearly insults the intelligence of its readers. Stop calling linux a non-unix os. Reminds me at something a former manager of unix/linux admins at a major us corporation asked me: "what do you mean by *nix?" when I asked about vmstat metrics on all the systems she managed.
How many more people are going to comment that Unix isn't declining before actually reading something other than the title? I've seen MacOS, Android, iOS, etc brought up many times regardless of the fact that this article is confining itself to analysis of the "enterprise server market." Apple does not market server hardware.
Second, GNU and Linux are not Unix. They are Unix-like.
Thing is, its amortization schedule was roughly 2 decades at least if I were to guess.
Just being pedantic here but properly speaking it would be depreciation, not amortization. Amortization is for intangible property. Depreciation is for tangible. And under MACRS depreciation schedule (typically required for taxes) most if not all of the depreciation would have occurred in the first 7 years.
The last non-UNIX OS share is declining.
IDC is simply ordered by the last non-UNIX OS (Windows) owner (Microsoft) to redact some PR to distort the reality. There solution is to count only the past generation of UNIX and to ignore all the new generation of UNIX, like all the Linux distributions, all IOS, all Android, almost all top supercomputer on the planet, the vast majority of routers, the vast majority of recent TV, the majority of web servers and data centers, and a lot of more specific applications and embedded systems.
Websites, databases, firewalls, DNS, application server, file-servers - most businesses run some form of UNIX or Linux. And wouldn't dare think otherwise. This article is stupid. I work for a company where we would literally lose millions for every reboot of certain mission critical servers. UNIX ain't going nowhere.
They said back in the 1990's that mainframes were on the way out yet IBM keeps pumping them out. I don't see Solaris disappearing from our operations until long after I retire.
To boot IBM now lets one run Linux on mainframe class hardware (the Z system). Actually the interesting trick is IBM in the mainframe line has run microcoded machines since at least the 370 line. As a result to get a new architecture, you just write new microcode. The system Z processors can run either Red Hat or Suse Enterprise editions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_zEnterprise_System. Given that the mainframe class of system has MTBF ranging from 20 to 50 years according to Wikipedia So partly if you have an app that has to be up, you can move the app to linux on the Z system and get far better availability than on HPUX or Solaris. Recall that the mantra of the mainframe is Reliability Availability and Serviceability.
RedHat and other versions of Unix have taken over the server market with Windows servers doing piecemeal things - why? Cost... It's a heck of a lot cheaper to deploy a CentOS, or RedHat system than pretty much any other... So you'll have to pardon my skepticism since I deal with customers - most of whom are scrapping their Windows servers for something more reliable, less expensive, and easier to maintain...
A mention of Microsoft and IDC in the same article makes the article suspect in my eyes.
Go ahead. Google it:
Microsoft IDC paid study
What do you think?
Seriously this is one of the greatest lies I ve ever seen!!!!! Someone pay to post here??? What happen?!!!!!! Even if this is not certified unix, linux kernel/ ios kernel are sons of unix, as well the HPuX, the IRIx and the solaris are.
geese are duck like yet they are not ducks
Linux is not unix,
bsd is not unix
just because *you* can't see the difference doesn't mean its the same.
it wasn't that long ago you'd be openly mocked on unix and linux forums a like for referring to linux as unix and vice versa
Doesn't the world deserve a modern OS after 50 years of legacy? All the files can be memory mapped, pipes can transmit objects with rich behavior rather than just bytes, /bin/sh is overdue for a state of the art replacement with optional GUI, GPU-based computing should be deeply integrated into everything.
And of course legacy stuff can be still made available with high degree of standards compatibility, but discouraged for new projects.
The dinosaurs didn't die out. Many of them went extinct, but the rest evolved into birds, a group which is more diverse, ubiquitous, and arguably more interesting than the dinosaurs ever were.
But it is not a "very large percentage".
"...whilst OS X might not be overly popular in the server market, it certainly has a very large percentage of the desktop market."
He is looking at 7% from the Linux desktop perspective, 7% seems quite large from that perspective.
Unix to the masses??? Apple could have put VMS or the Windows core under the hood, and "the masses" wouldn't have known the difference. Or cared much for that matter. OS X is the pretty interface to almost everyone who uses it, I can count on one had the Mac users that I know who have any idea what BSD even is.
Its underlying Unix nature and compatibility help OS X adoption in higher education. This is why the console and X Window system were part of the standard install rather than optional installs.
Not all Unix users know or care about [insert Unix flavor here]. They have a specialized app, they know the app, the don't know or care what is hosting the app.
I was at IBM's Technical University last fall in Las Vegas and sat in on a session with Jay Kruemcke (Power Systems software Program Director at IBM). He basically said they were not worried about Linux overtaking AIX. Well, they should be. IBM has lost so much market share on their Power PC platform that I don't know if they can recover. Think about all the systems out there that USED to run on ppc: Apple computers, Xbox, Playstation and Wii video game consoles. All of the latest incantations of these systems are now - or will be soon - running x86. That's a lot of places IBM wont be selling ppc (or its derivatives) to. Sure there is still iSeries and AIX running on Power, but remember just a few years ago iSeries didn't run on Power. While Power may be a great architecture, IBM is struggling to keep it relevant. My guess is that Power 8 will be the last ppc we see.
Is plan 9 taking off that well?
Merge the tissue and the OS: Kleenix
I blew my nose with Winex, but got a Blew Screen of Death.
Table-ized A.I.
The amount of nines in UNIX claims is too damn high!
Really, to get more reliable than Linux with your "UNIX" system, you need to do an awful lot of things very good. Doing the same things good on Linux will probably get you very similar availability statistics. When you are designing a high availability platform you need to design software, middleware, OS, iron, networking and storage to work as an integrated system with fail over and load balancing on all levels. Relying on a single box with a single OS instance on a RAID-5 disk set isn't going to get you the numbers you are after. It doesn't matter who makes the hardware or the OS, it's going to fail and it will hurt your availability.
Linux has for many years been just as reliable as the traditional UNIX flavors. The real difference is in the people that make all the mistakes and shortcuts that will hurt availability. With traditional UNIX, everything used to be sacred and partially because of the costs, a lot of investments were made into solid operation and design of systems. "Oh put it on Linux, it's not important and it's cheaper. Just use some old written of Windows server hardware for it, it'll take the load just fine." has been the mantra of many shops for a lot of years. This sort of attitude would result in Linux getting lower reliability numbers. Not because of the OS, but because of the way it was deployed. Once more and more companies started to use Linux seriously to get a competitive edge, or just because they didn't have the budget for the legacy UNIX stuff, it turned out it was actually just as good.
I remember taking about 10% of the local web hosting market 14 years ago with a linux-only company. All the competition was running on IRIX and Solaris and just couldn't match our prices. They had big money behind them and weren't making a profit, we were. The entire company was only funded once at the start and the entire growth was funded from profits. You can't do that if the OS isn't good enough to work competitively. We did about 99.8% on single instance web servers and we probably would have done 99.9% if we didn't have a single uplink causing several hour long down times a year at the time. This was 14 years ago and it's only gotten better.
NASA and several other space agencies are using Linux for mission critical applications. I've worked on a satellite data crunching platform that had 6hr service windows that would lose measurements forever if that window got missed or data wasn't backed up after processing within 24 hours. Due to cost, there was no spare hardware and storage was on RAID5. Some servers were single instance and failover was manually. This platform is now over 10 years up and running and it hasn't missed a single bit of data.
These examples were from before there was "enterprise grade" high availability built into Linux distributions. It was from before raid6 or iSCSI storage networks and such. Linux has had enough reliability for a long time and it's gotten better and better. The amount of nines in the claims of traditional UNIX has little to do with the OS or the hardware, but much more with the way you work with it. Lately, I've seen expensive traditional UNIX systems behave like an unpatched windows95 PC. Single instance, EOL hardware, EOL OS, EOL software will do that to you. Spontaneous reboots, no vendor support, data loss, intermittent failures, the works. Even though they bought everything "first class", it was giving them all the trouble that Linux was supposed to give you if you believed the FUD the traditional UNIX vendors would like you to believe. It's not (so much) about what you buy, but it's about how you use it that matters most.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Our company sells software products for *nix platforms. Five years ago we only supported HP and Sun but started looking at Redhat. Now the majority of our customers are on Redhat. Costs are lower and performance is so cheap these days that you don't need fancy hardware. And the "you really ought to port ot AIX" lobby has totally died out.
WOW. If my comment isn't squarely ON-TOPIC, I don't know what is.
Story is "The Steady Decline of Unix" and I'm talking about the Unixes that have lost substantial market-share.
Lovely.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Did anyone bother to check to see whether Netcraft confirmed this?
My hypothesis is that UNIX will die because of all the hours spent replying to this thread by developers and sysadmins, leaving servers to crash, distros to not be released positioning the world for a coup de tat by the evil window$ empire.
We all know Smartphones and Tablets will take over the world. At least the Chairthrower-in-chief thinks so.
Android and iOS are both based on Unix-type kernels. Millions of these devices are sold every month. They talk to NSA-Google servers which run the Linux kernel. Arguably, the Unix OS has taken over the world, including the 1984 servers.
Now, take that, M$.
The annoyance and confusion displayed in replies to this article all stem from the fact that mentioning 'UNIX' on it's own without clarification can be ambiguous. Though a reasonable meaning can be assumed in this case. So here is some clarification in a digestible order for those unaware of the complexity involved in the use of the term... For the short version skip to the bottom.
UNIX
UNIX is the name of AT&T's original OS and is unofficially used to refer to it's many source derivatives through commercial vendors. However most of these can also officially be called UNIX, see POSIX bellow...
UNIX is a trademark that is currently owned by The Open Group. This organisation maintains the POSIX specification, and certifies systems that conform to the specification allowing them to officially use the UNIX trademark. The purpose of POSIX is to maintain compatibility between Unix variants: It is possible for any system (source derivative of AT&T's or not) to comply to this specification, become certified and use the UNIX trademark.
So in the strictest of sense UNIX refers only to POSIX compliant systems (This is at least what The Open Group would like), this will mostly include systems that are also source derivatives of AT&T's Unix. However it also includes those that are not, a usefully complex and deceiving example is Apple's OS X base system "Darwin" which is POSIX compliant and can be officially called UNIX (and has been)... It would be easy to assume that this is through some kind of source inheritance (which it isn't even though it is... read on): Darwin like most has a complicated ancestral tree, but can be described loosely as a combination of FreeBSD, NextStep and the Mach Kernel (XNU), each with their own complex history. Looking closer at FreeBSD this is where the potential inheritance appears, however firstly: FreeBSD is Unix-Like and does comply with POSIX, secondly: it is not a source derivative of AT&T's Unix (even though it is)... just to prevent follow up posts here's why: The three famous BSD's are all derivatives of 386BSD, the precursor to this short lived BSD was an attempt to create a system functionally identical to AT&T's but without any of AT&T's source, thus being free, they replaced almost all of the files and then removed the remaining to produce 386BSD. However! AT&T's Unix and variants have all used various portions of 386BSD and it's derivative's code many times, which means they share source but not the way around most people think, which is why FreeBSD is free or course... This is the part that gets many people confused about FreeBSD and why many end up calling it UNIX, many official POSIX compliant UNIX variants (including AT&T's) contain code directly from FreeBSD, however it came from FreeBSD, and more importantly FreeBSD is not POSIX compliant... ok i think i've hammered that in enough now.
UNIX-Like
As mentioned above a system must conform to the POSIX specification to use the UNIX trademark, those that do not but have similarities are bundled into the UNIX-Like category, these should never be called just "UNIX"... not because it's infringing on the official trademark, but because it doesn't conform to the specification and creates confusion, a line must be drawn somewhere, that's the whole point of POSIX. Linux doesn't conform to POSIX and it doesn't try to, it has it's own specification, there are many similarities in the spec and that is why they are called UNIX-Like along with FreeBSD, Minix et-cetera. Unfortunately they are quite commonly referred to as UNIX anyway, and this ads to the already confusing scenario above.
The Steady Decline Implicitly
The article means UNIX (as in derivative and POSIX) on the server platform where it has long been, for the few that are not commonly used on server platforms can be ignored due to context. Linux and co are not included, that should be clear by now.
Even elite operators such as Deutsche Börse (one of the largest financial exchanges globally) now moved from Solaris and VMS to Linux. Don't hold your breath for Solaris surviving for long.
They also whacked Oracle and want to use Postgresql as much as possible. The message is: "if you know what you do, you don't need expensive crap from the commercial vendors. Hire elite software engineers instead".
Linux *is* Unix.
Take solaris for instance, you can't use arrow keys to move cursor in command-line or search its history (PS: it's 21st century). The default shell is garbage, man-page is trash compared to GNU's, cp/mv/whatever commands you can find on it don't even have useful help info and lack a lot of features.
For so many years they remained the same ugly pieces of junkwares. No change on GUI, no improvement to CLI, every single pieces of useful or popular softwares come from open-source world, while the OS companies themselves did little or nothing.
You could count the little things such as ZFS - except Linux has more than 5 major file-systems for different needs and ZFS contains nothing new that hasn't been implemented in other systems. It's one or two features in 20 years - Even Microsoft isn't that lazy and tries to add sound features in every new versions, useful or not.
Please just die.
WHOOOOOOSH!!!!!
Most notably, confirming that BSD is dead. I think you might be onto something with "just another bad internet meme."
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
...complains baking is broken because it isn't like cutting hair.
Is it just me, or is anyone else tired of hearing from people who used a product or service once and hated it because it wasn't just like the product or service they normally use? Too much of the crap is "I don't know how to use a chainsaw, but here's what's wrong with yours..."
Combine that with the fact that Solaris is now in the hands of Oracle, who are squeezing out everybody who doesn't have a support contract and pissing off people who used to use it ... or that HPUX is still in the hands of HP (where technology goes to die) ... and what's even left?
AIX is still around, but I have no idea of how widespread. Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to think of another commercial version of UNIX I've encountered. (That doesn't mean they don't exist, but they were never in any shops I was in.)
That pretty much leaves Linux as the primary UNIX-like-thing for most people.
Solaris is open sourced nowadays in a separate fork. Several of the legendary Solaris hackers quit when Oracle bought Sun, and they joined Open Solaris (all ZFS creators, all DTrace creators, etc). The development of Solaris continues outside, for instance open sourced ZFS has features that Oracle ZFS does not have. Go open source ZFS if you want the fastest development.
illumos is the Solaris kernel, similar to Linux. There are lot of Open Solaris distros: OmniOS (ServerOS), SmartOS (CloudOS, really innovative and new cool tech here by the DTrace creators), Nexenta (Enterprise storage OS), Tegile (sells Enterprise storage servers that competes with NetApp), Greenbyte (Enterprise storage competing with NetApp), OpenIndiana, etc etc etc.
You are mixing up things. For instance, the SGI Altix and UV1000 Linux server with 1000s of cores, is just a cluster. ScaleMP also has 1000s of cores, and it too is a cluster. Sure, ScaleMP runs a single image Linux kernel, but it is using a software hypervisor to trick Linux into believing the cluster is a single fat SMP server. But it is in fact a cluster: ... makes them look like a giant virtual SMP server with a shared memory space....Depending on the cores per chip and the generation you use, you can have from 2,048 to 8,192 cores in a single image."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/scalemp_supports_amd_opterons/
"Rather than carve up a single system image into multiple virtual machines, vSMP takes multiple physical servers and
Actually, there is no single Linux server for sale with 16 or even as large as 32 cpus. Linux can not handle 16 or 32 cpu servers. Linux runs fine on a cluster, but not on a single fat SMP server. There are none for sale, and has never been. I challenge any one of you that says Linux scales well: "Show us links to a 16 or 32 cpu Linux server for sale".
You can not. They dont exist, due to Linux bad scaling. There are 8192 core (not cpus) huge Linux servers, but they are disguised clusters. And there are up to 8 socket Linux servers (IBM, HP, Oracle sells ordinary x86 servers), but there are no 16 cpu Linux servers for sale. So, Linux scales very bad, up to 8 sockets. If you want a server with 16 or 32 cpus, you need to go to Unix servers, such as IBM P795 or Oracle M5-32 or HP Superdome servers. Those are large and mean and costs millions. So if you need scalability beyond 16 sockets, you can not buy a Linux server. Because there are none for sale. Because Linux can not handle that scalability. Large SMP servers are used in the Enterprise and costs millions of USD and are very expensive and high margin. Clusters are cheap and low margin. If Linux could handle 16 cpu servers, Linux servers could be sold for half the price of a IBM or Oracle or HP, and they would rake in millions and be billionaires. Wall Street would switch to Linux 16 cpu servers, everyone would do it, and Unix would die in an instant. The reason Unix exists, is for the high end. Even Larry Ellison said "I love Linux but Linux is for low end, Solaris is for high end" when he bought Sun. If you need 16 cpus or even larger server - you have no choice. High end is Unix (and Mainframes). No one sells 16 socket Linux servers. No one, and has never been sold.
this article is the final straw for me and slashdot.... anyone who knows anything should be aware its superfluous contentious claptrap, contrived to create a reaction and debate on an issue that's well under the bridge and pointless to discuss... just more spam in my inbox... goodbye slashdot, it was nice when it was relevant... how ironic...
There's a difference between OSX , QNX and all the other "NIXes? Other than tweaks here and tweaks there, and different GUIs, seems to me that UNIX is really having it's biggest boom ever....
these people are gobbledygook merchants. the article is the most mindless thing i've ever read.
Unix, the Xenix flavor, was one of Microsoft's first products back in the day. Windows NT, the non-graphical part is largely derived from the original BSD release. If you look really diligently into the windows kernel api you will find all those kernel function calls so near and dear to the heart of C developers like select, mmap, fork and all those lovely flavors of exec. NT is a version of BSD. Microsoft even hints at that fact in which they explain the use BSD license code but not GPL. Windows is a degrading priority round robin scheduling kernel which sounds a lot like??
I have been a Unix sysadmin and C/C++ developer since 1984 on most major platforms. I have been a Windows developer for more than a decade. My credentials are pretty solid here.
Truth is Unix deserves to die if for no other reason than to spare developers having to read those obtuse, cryptic and poorly designed manuals. The Irix flavor at its peak in 1994 had 28 volumes. Sadly I read every page of every one of them and really wish I cold get those hours of my life back.
I know why people write silly articles like this but why are we wasting our time discussing it here? :)