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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."
The decline is from the price point. My last place of employment had 1 HP UX server that costed upwards of 25K for software and specific HP hardware to run on. migrating to windows cost a fraction of that in OS licenses and hardware, even though it took 8 windows servers to do what the one UX server did, it was still cheaper.
The biggest UNIX vendor in the world-- Apple, Inc.-- has had its UNIX laptops increase in market share in almost every quarter for the last 5 years. And although it's not certified UNIX like its desktop sibling, iOS is based on the same core... not sure what value differentiating this specific market segment offers. In the server, Linux seems to be doing just fine, and is close enough to UNIX for it not to matter.
E pluribus unum
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.
I'd be curious to know what exactly the HP-UX server did that could so easily be moved over to a cluster of Windows servers, myself. Apart from believing that one can buy eight servers with Windows Server licences and come out much less than $25k, I'm just trying to sort out what this server would have actually been running that one could simply go "Oh well, we're going to Windows now."
I've found damned few cases in my experience when wholesale moving from one platform ecosystem to another platform ecosystem was a viable activity in and of itself, unless it was part of a long term strategy of retooling and recoding. I've seen some organizations move from Unix to Linux, but generally with the notion that porting apps was relatively easy or had already been done. But to move from *nix to Windows is a big deal, unless you're running everything in Java EE, in which case why would you completely change your ecosystem with other *nix variants out there?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's "OS X" not "OS-X". It's also not a "variant". It is Unix.
Windows NT was certified as POSIX compliant.
Windows NT!
Added bonus: they can use it to heat their building in the winter. I once spent a couple of months sitting next to one of those babies in an un-airconditioned space in the summer. Despite being close to the water, where it was consistently cool outside, that machine kept it nice and toasty inside. I still twitch a little if you say dazzdee. You can keep amortizing a machine while it's powered off and in a warehouse, and save yourself a bunch of money emulating a 370 in software on some reasonably powerful Xeon server. Or just sell the thing for scrap and write it off as a loss.
I can give the counter-arguments against using Windows:
* You're guaranteed to suffer every month for maintenance (Patch Tuesday), and require multiple machines not just for capacity-matching, but for redundancy if you want anywhere near the same uptime. In spite of an MCSE/MCSA being cheaper, one competent UNIX admin can maintain 3x the machine count than an MCSE/MCSA can - unless you feel like springing for a lot of pricey add-ons/upsells to keep admin FTE headcount down (e.g. automation via SCOM,SCCM and etc). It doesn't take too much for that SA contract cost to match or exceed the HP one, especially if the Microsoft products have the word "Enterprise" in the product title/license.
* All that aside, I haven't even touched on increased space, power consumption, cooling/HVAC, and etc... the costs scale up almost exponentially in larger installations.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
MacOS X's core OS is open source. You can download the kernel and recompile it and swap yours in if you want to, and all the standard user space stuff is basically FreeBSD.
Also, it is a certified UNIX 03 operating system, so it is more "UNIX" than Linux, which is what I assume you're comparing it to.
E pluribus unum
XNU is a Mach 2.5 kernel with the BSD 4.3 userland layered on top. And it is not "reminiscent of Unix" it is certified Unix.
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.
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.
By this statement "windows cost a fraction of that in OS licenses and hardware" means that you have no clue how proprietary Unix works. Buying the hardware gives you license to the Unix. Hardware maintenance means you pay for maintenance on your Unix. If you jump into your time machine, long ago you used to have to pay extra for compilers and custom graphics drivers. Never did you have to pay for the Unix (no, SCO does not count!)
When you move to PC based hardware, especially when moving to Windows, you lose up time and get instability. SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, and Irix were always very stringent on hardware. This increased price of course, but damn if I don't have Sun E3s that still run from the 1980s. That, and they simply work without people putting their hands on them at all. Compared to Windows and weekly reboots? No thanks!
Linux adds some of the stability to the bulk hardware, but the bulk hardware is simply not as good. Making bulk means you lack the amount of QA put into proprietary hardware. Issues with driver compatibility are not as easily seen when you can mix and match what ever is cheapest. Our Dell and HP is not "bad" per-say, but not like it is with IBM P Series, Sun, or HP Unix.
8 machines to replace 1 does not save money. This is typical bean counter bullshit (fuzzy math) and not reality. A decent server is at least $2.5 K means you spent $20,000 on just hardware. Add OS licenses, AV protection, TS for remote admin work, Software do to _anything at all with_, additional network support, load balancing or HA to compensate for down time, and admin time, and you have nearly doubled the $25,000 you claim was too much for Unix.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
BSD is AT&T [pre v7] Unix derived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
I was doing Unix device driver work in startups since 1981 [v7, system III, system V] and we always referred to them with "Unix" attached (e.g. "Unix System III" or "Unix v7" or "v7 Unix"). Likewise, BSD was "BSD Unix"
POSIX was born out of a desire to produce standards that allowed Unix-compatible systems to be created that were not AT&T derived [i.e. eliminate the AT&T licensing stranglehold]. AT&T could copyright Unix source/binary distros. But, it couldn't copyright the API's [Note to Oracle ;-)]
The non-Unix derived systems that truly aspired to look, act, feel like Unix [and be free] were: Minix, Linux, Mach. No doubt there are others that didn't quite make it to completion. Obviously, Linux took the crown [I loaded my first distro in 1993]. Though not an OS, the other piece of the puzzle is GNU/FSF providing "clean room" reimplementations of the standard POSIX (nee Unix) utilities.
I stopped using the term "Unix" a long time ago. Now, I usually say Linux, *BSD, Solaris, or "POSIX-compliant OS", etc.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Oh fuck me, I'll bite.
Hmmm, where to even start with WIndows?
Ok, how about having to spend $1500 plus in training to find the damn shit that Microsoft decided to once again obfuscate behind 16 tabs and buttons in lame, third-grade designed dialog boxes just to set one service preference? I can edit a text file that's been formatted the same for ten years (or more) and setup most common Linux services.
How about, every time a new version of Windows Server hits you have to wonder how many new versions of other software you have to buy just to keep your system secure, and/or running? FOSS wins.
Ever heard of a man page? I know Windows admins also have to do their homework before they can weed their way through the 16 levels of dialog box Hell to get to deploying a...well anything!
Good package management handles dependencies without a problem. At least it doesn't break something every few Tuesdays.
Yep, you still need to reboot, if you don't know how to build your own kernel and modularize services so you can reboot less. Plus, shell scripts are your friend for those little annoying service restarts.
Things aren't automatic in Linux because Linux admins don't like opening up gaping security holes, or maybe just want a little more control over what is going on. Different strokes.
You see command line syntax as "limitations", *nix admins see it as not effing up while on the command line. One wrong space between characters can be bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Just like turning on one wrong checkbox six levels deep in WIndows dialog boxes. What's the difference? A pain in the ass is a pain in the ass.
"I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot." You contradicted yourself there....see man pages. Also, Google is your friend...see homework.
Of course, the point of my rebuttal is to remind you that we all started at zero no matter what OS we chose to use to serve whatever we need to serve. It's when we forget this and forget the merits of all OSes that we truly have lowered the IQ of the room. Right tool, right job. If you want to be a master mechanic you can't just use screwdrivers. 'Nuf said.
P.S. "Error prone manual labor", from a WIndows admin....That's funny.
Ok, I'll bite.
Cool - allow me to dispel some bits:
-- You still need to patch, or install 140+ dependencies to install one application. Same difference.
RedHat-based: yum -y install (whatever).
Debian-based: apt-get install (whatever).
Best part is, you can put the whole list in at once if you want in one go.
Windows world? It's gotten better (adding roles and features), but it's still reboot hell at times.
-- You still need to reboot. A lot. More than I thought.
Only if you're patching the kernel or glibc. Protip: If you don't want to bother plowing through reboots just because you don't like restarting services, learn to use the telinit command. ;)
-- Things that really ought to be automatic, aren't. I spent a good 50% of the lab doing really fiddly things like cut & pasting iptables rules to open firewall ports. The installer really should have just done that for me.
Clue: Windows application installers don't usually mod the firewall either (unless we're talking MSFT-branded ones, e.g. SQL Server.)
Binding services together and just generally getting things to start up and talk required an awful lot of error prone manual labour.
'fraid you'll have to be more specific than what you posted, because you're not making sense here. What exactly do you mean by "binding services together"?
I love the disclaimer in the training guide: "Linux configuration scripts do not tolerate typos, are case sensitive, and are not possible to validate before running the associated service." Fun stuff. I can't wait to diagnose random single-character problems in 10 kilobyte files when the only error is that one of a dozen services barfed when started.
You mean like when a seemingly random multi-MB .aspx file has a single typo in it, causing IIS to not run, with only a cryptic (and definitely non-intuitive) generic blurb buried somewhere deep in Event Viewer? Or how about a typo in some config file (lurking under a dozen nested folders) causes SSRS to fall over?
Or are you just arsed over case-sensitivity? ;)
Wow, the 70s called and wanted their limitations back: spaces in file names?
Just like in Powershell, you may want to learn to use quotes or escape chars... and with MSFT moving away from the GUI at the server level, you'd better get used to it.
IPv6? In theory, not in practice.
Now I know you're trolling, or are completely ignorant.
GUI config wizards? Nope.
Clue: Wizards are going away in Windows too. Better brush up on Powershell. ;)
Want to make a configuration change to a service without having to stop & start it? You're dreaming!
That's actually an advantage: one can change all kinds of differing network info (IP addy, DNS, NIS/windbind, etc) over ssh (think RDP for grown men ;) ), and not have the machine blink out until you're ready to commit those changes.
An editor more user friendly than vi?
Try EMACS (I kid, I kid...) In all seriousness, there's a zillion of them, with varying opinions. vi on the other hand has the advantage of being universal. I can use it in Linux, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, etc.
A lot more portable and capable than Notepad, dontcha think?
-- I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot, but how-the-fuck would I know what "-e" does on some random command?
man {so
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No it isn't open source. They haven't released their code in a long long time.
10.8.4 is the latest and is available: http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1084/
Note you should expect a few months delay between release of a new version of MacOS X and release of the open source components on this site, but up until now they have always delivered.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.