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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 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.
Windows NT was certified as POSIX compliant.
Windows NT!
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.
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.