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SGI, others embracing Linux
TitanII writes "ZDNet News has an article about SGI switching to Linux. " The article itself talks about the switchover going on in many of the major tech firms-SGI isn't actually replacing Irix, but is making Linux a major offering across their platforms.
Nasa would love to hear that their Linux supercomputing clusters are "low end general purpose servers", according to some dork on slashdot...
tee hee
> Let the weak and dying odd ball variants of
> Unix be culled. And let us continue to
> consolidate so that Unix as a whole remains
> competitive well into the next century.
odd ball variants of Unix?
Who the h*ll are you? You wouldn't be one of
those people who think Unix is just a club to
beat Microsoft with, would you?
Sheesh! Kids these days!
SGI uses much faster memory on their computers I think.
I have several thousand dollars worth of commercial linux software on this machine--software which I paid for.
So much for your bullshit.
Just kidding. At last SGI is making a smart move. Their move to NT was a serious insult to their long time supporters. I hope this is a serious attempt to provide good system software for their sometimes excellent machines.
Linux will never have lots of commercial software because its users never want to pay for anything.
If you're the type to buy commercial software you're probably running NT or Solaris anyway.
Can you list a single application that you've
bought? You only list Linux distributions in the
above.
And please don't try to tell me "the applications
are all included with the distributions".
That isn't going to impress applications
developers considering a commerical port to
Linux.
I wonder if ZDNet has Microsoft on the brain - look at the two links provided as related stories:
* Microsoft ponders open source
* Ballmer opens up on Linux
Be careful, you're treading on religious matters
now. In the Linux Religion it's against
scripture to Reboot.
The Electric Utilities must LOVE Linux these
days. All these hackers who use their machine
3-5 hours a day but who leave the machine on 24
hours a day (because Uptime is sooo macho!!)
hafta be doing wonderful things to their bottom
line.
Irix going into Intel hardware reminds me a bit of the move that Sun did a while back. They kept with the SPARC processor, but surrounded it with a PCI bus, IDE CD-ROM/Hard Drives... and I forget if they use standard commodity memory or not.
To say that SGI doesn't have a lot to lose is a no-brainer. It is interesting to see companies going Linux when it comes time to make big changes.
Not if it just locked up hard on the network card ;-) Plus, I was using one of the Vortex (3com) drivers like on kernel 2.0.36, and it gave me occasional kernel panics. Those suck.
Let's see. In the past 8 months since becoming a Linux user I have sent $80 to Applix, $50 to Corel, $45 to Star for the "deluxe" personal edition, over $100 to Axene for their DTP program, $99 to Informix, $100 to Ton for a Blender key, various amounts for graphics shareware programs, among others..... And this does not include the money that will be spent on CTP and Q3 when they show up on the shelves or the yet to be charged order for Code Warrior. And this is only for my 2 home boxes.
Yeah, I guess Linux users are too cheap to buy commercial software.
excellent argument...
I think the person is Linas Vespas.
He is a consultant for IBM.
He ports Linux on his personal time.
The target is S/390 hardware.
It partly boots.
Too bad for you that Linux continues to garner support from every manufacturer of high end software and hardware.
Get this: SGI will soon be announcing complete turnkey animation systems based on Linux. Within a couple years, almost every new movie you see will have Linux/SGI based special effects.
Heh. That's easy enough to answer.
SCO's not going to compete in the long run. The only reason they've not (and probably will not) go under is all the legacy telephony SCO software.
It directly affects NT. SGI isn't replacing Irix on their MIPS boxes, they are replacing NT on their VW boxes.
Is this simple enough for your pea brain to understand?
The person invoked the corollary to Godwins rule. The corollary to Godwins rule says it follows directly that invoking names of dictators and despots as analogues ends the thread.
If they kept the SPARC, its not really "Intel" hardware is it? Ok, ok, the PCI bus. :-)
This is only currently on the Ultra 5 and 10. Thelowend boxen. The market for cheaper/faster workstations looks like what dictated this. It's just a finger in the market, but if it gets people
to use unix or linux, I think that's just spiffy.
sixl6@dimensional.com
By the odd ball variants, I suppose he meant all the unsuccessful versions of Unix which have struggled for recognition. Most likely he meant all the failed experiments such as Coherent, Apollo, NetBSD, Esix, FreeBSD, and so on.
By clicking on your ID it is easy to see that you are a *BSD advocate. I suppose you are just a little over sensitive about the problems of your favorite hobby. Well, don't worry. No matter how much other operating systems succeed, no one can take away your *BSD from you. You can keep using it as long as you like (assuming the legal dissent decree continues to stand). As the song goes "Don't worry; Be happy!"
It seems ext3 will have good competition even without XFS. For example reiserfs will be integrated to the kernel in near future.
It's filesystem is excellent. If they ported xfs it would become ext2s replacement. OpenGL is also great.
You're the one who mentioned Hitler. So _your_
branch of the thread is officially dead.
*oh, wait!*
(oops)
(the Stalin/Lenin comparison really bugged the
above writer. Enough to TRY to kill the thread
by invoking Hitler)
You should go read thier info on the Visual Workstation. It is quite revolutionary.
They have a switch that connects every thing on the bus. The video card doesnt have its own memory it uses main memory. Yes that is right. You want 64megs for video or 256megs you decide.
Do that with a clone.
'nuff said :)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
considering those damn 50 ft banners i saw driving to werk every morning saying that they are using NT...just kinda pissed me off :P
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
woo journaling file system! is why i like BeOS...when i was having netwerk card problems (system lockups) i could hit the power button and reboot at the same speed as if i had done a proper shutdown :) pretty cool
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
(I dunno but I been told)
XFS before we're old
(XFS before we're old)
Portin' is in progress now
(Portin' is in progress now)
Gonna kill Billy's cash cow
(Gonna kill Billy's cash cow)
Hey, this AC thing can be useful on occassion...
If there is one piece of code :-)
I would like integrated back it's their
file system. No more 1 hour long fsck on large
RAIDs, this is critical to me. Giving a bit of
competition to Ext3 would probably motivate the
developpers to ship
Daniel.Veillard@w3.org
Consolidation and standardization is far preferable to too much "diversity". Finally the Unix field is being unified under the Linux banner. The marketplace has decided, not some pointy headed ISO committee meeting in secret. One of the first points Unix detractors have always made is that there is "too much diversity" in the Unix field. No single entity has been strong enough to offer real competition.
Let the weak and dying odd ball variants of Unix be culled. And let us continue to consolidate so that Unix as a whole remains competitive well into the next century.
And the comparisons to Stalin and Communism are idiotic. Is it time to invoke the corollary to Goodwin's Law? Stalin, Lenin, Hitler. The Thread is officially dead.
What a moronic utterance - if Linux users are unwilling to pay for anything, how on earth do you account for the explosive growth of Linux vendors Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Pacific HiTech?
How do suppose VA Research is growing so fast? They sell preconfigured Linux servers, workstation and laptops - and they are not giving them away, by any means!
NO, you're quite mistaken - Linux users are happy to pay for good software - however they do like a bargain, and are generally too smart to pay inflated prices for inferior products.
When I was at comdex last month (in chicago), i ran by the SGI booth and got to talking with one of the sales reps... he said that they were working something with Linux (he wouldn't say) he told me to keep my eye out. Wow, i had no idea it was going to be this big!
I think this is great, I'd like to see some 3d hardware/apps developed for it, or atleast a nifty line of SGI Linux workstations *grin*.
Linux is now the de facto Unix standard. IBM, HP, SGI, Compaq, Sun, SCO (and UnixWare)--all the major Unix vendors now offer Linux or Linux compatibility. Even the minor and niche players boast of Linux compatibility. Linus Torvalds once joked about world domination. But his jest seems now to have been omniscient prophecy.
I agree but if someday the UNIX market joined together agian it would be an extermly powerful force.
Remember Right now you have more than 5 seperate trees of UNIX development. They are very competitive with lots of current development. Imagine if there was a common goal and they started focusing on what they did best.
wow
but SUN still does not get it and I fear they never will.
It all depends on perspective. If you look at this as killing off Irix I agree with you.
I look at as giving me more options and furthering true competition.
One day Linux will die but we all will learn valuable lessons from it and the next revolution will benefit from the years and years of colaborative experience.(decades?)
Remember the real goal of linux is not to take over the world but to satify the needs of the community.
When people get excited they talk of world domination and that is healthy.
The reason that this is a blow to NT is that SGI's
newest boxes, their Visual Workstations, right now
only run NT. Regardless of what the ZD article
said, they were never going to run Irix, it was
going to be NT and NT only. So, this is a clear
win for Unix and a loss for NT.
Couldn't happen to a nicer OS.
Unix is fragmented for a long time and NT server's success is partly due to this. So when Unix vendors standardize on Linux,they're removing one major weakness NT is praying on. Consider
So now for the first time Unix app has a real chance of being united (write once available/run every where). Isn't this a blow to NT?
Probably not... SGI are after all playing in a market there the software in some cases are more expensive than the hardware they run on...
But If you are using Linux you just do a simple /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart =)
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
SGI are trying to increase their sales volume with the Visual Workstations, not just replace sales of IRIX boxes on a one-for-one basis. Therefore this may well increase the market share of SGI-built Unix-like OS running computers, despite SGI selling computers with NT on as well. Assuming they succeed.
If all the proprietary OS vendors switch to Open Source I think this will be a good thing. If there is only one Open Source OS left standing this will be a bad thing. But I see no evidence that this will happen.
The *BSD folks are doing excellent work and aren't going to stop anytime soon. There are a number of "alternative" OS projects that are moving slowly. They'll continue to exist as long as there are hackers keen on doing something different. Choice seems to be alive and well.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
During the past year I've purchased boxed sets of OpenLinux 1.3, 2.2, Red Hat 5.2, 6.0, and SuSE 6.0, 6.1. If there were any Linux applications that I could by at CompUSA, I'd be dangerous.
TedC
It would be especially nice to get away from that broken cascade on IRQ2->IRQ9 16-bit interrupt scheme. That thing sucked in 1985!
There's a lot of cruft in the BIOS that could be axed as well.
TedC
TedC
I cried when HP-UX 9 went away too.
>Remember, when something is open-sourced anybody can run with the algorhythms. SGI certainly knows this.
You don't actually think that SGI would be stupid enough put any of this code under a BSD-style licence do you? It most likey be either GPL or some variation of it in order to make sure that it won't be "borrowed" by certain people....
One comes across a lot of people switching from NT to Linux. One rarely meets anyone switching from Linux to NT.
There's actually a bunch of PCs that already do that. (The sharing video ram with the system.)
Most of HP's low end consumer machines do that.
Computers with a better unified memory architecture are going to probably be the next big change in PCs. At some point legacy busses, and separate busses for video (AGP) and peripherals (PCI) are going to have to go away.
SGI's got the right idea with the way the O2's are put together, and the NUMA architecture used in the O200's and up.
Even an x86 version of the O2 would be cool.
> SCO's not going to compete in the long run. The
:) The majority of customers I deal with are small businesses running accounting apps, custom software, and vertical market applications.
> only reason they've not (and probably will not)
> go under is all the legacy telephony SCO
> software.
Unfortunately SCO has a much larger legacy market than just telephony.
I support Openserver and Unixware professionally (feel my pain, brothers!
Probably the quickest death to most of SCO's customer base would be Linux support of applications like MAS/90 or Realworld.
Linux will be folding in features of Irix. This is good news for Linux.
This also means more seats for Linux, since it's a direct option against NT.
I guess we'll have to wait till we see how sales of the Linux machines compare against sales with NT installed.. Obviously, they think they'll make more money using Linux versus Irix.
Ben
*sigh* What a pity... nice knowing you, you will be missed.
So does this mean we're in for a new line of cheap SGI Intel Visual Workstations now that they're not subject to the M$ tax for NT Workstation?
I dont think SGI is just going to phase out IRIX as yet. They do still make MIPS based boxes, which like to use IRIX very much, it makes them happy. They are now offering linux (as many have pointed out) for their new Intel based line. They initially offered NT...but some people want a unix OS instead of M$. This is good for linux as one anonymous coward pointed out, it just puts linux in another place to help it become an all around OS. They could have used a BSD or spent alot of money developing IRIX for x86 architecture but why bother when there's already a nice workstation OS around: linux. The whole point of having a x86 line of workstations is to give people without alot of MIPS/IRIX experience to be interested in an SGI workstation. If I had the 4000 bucks I would buy one. Have you seen the specs on them? They may be x86 but they really kick ass. 64 bit PCI bus, video I/O, huge AGP bus bandwidth. mmmmmmmmmmmmm
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Oh great, they fixed the typo without marking it as an update so now it makes me look like an idiot! Thanks alot guys! (For those of you who missed it, it really did say "is actually replacing" at first.)
---
Shouldn't that read "isn't actually replacing"?
---
Check out the BBC article.
Cheers,
Alex
Because as Linux use grows, so will the number of apps for it, and the number of people hacking at/on it. This can only help Linux seem to be a more viable alternative to NT.
Folks:
I see a great deal of discussion on what Linux does, what IRIX does, and competition between them. I would ask that this be looked on somewhat differently. Linux on the SGI product line not only enhances the breadth of the product line, but it vastly increases the size of the market in which they will play.
There are some places where Linux cannot play today, and IRIX does a great job. There are places where IRIX is not as cost effective as Linux, and thus Linux is the appropriate platform. Where they overlap is not competition, but user choice. It is a function of application requirements, and end user preferences.
I am obviously biased as far as this goes, but I see this offering as a positive step for the market, it opens up many new choices that others previously had wished to remain closed.
The question should be rephrased:
'What advanced features of Irix is SGI willing to give away for free?' Remember, when something is open-sourced anybody can run with the algorhythms. SGI certainly knows this.
Until that question is answered (and yes, the answer may be "all of them"- but I have my doubts) it is hard to see Irix disappearing.
"Code" is protected by the GPL.
Algorhythms are not.
In cases where it's fancy math (i.e. graphics rendering) being done, the GPL can be easily defeated by anybody who studies the algorhythms behind the code and does a re-implementation after studying the GPL'd code. That's why "trade secret" protection (not releasing the source code) has been so popular for so long. It's why some interests are so much into Software Patents (which WOULD protect a disclosed algorhythm). It's why you don't find much GPL'd DSP code.
Surprisingly, then, the thread hasn't ended yet. Though people are avoiding talking about any real issues by trying to turn it into a discussion of arcane Usenet folklore. The usual babble of the monitor-tanned.
To get things back on track, Mr. "Invoke Hitler" championed "consolidation and standards" and then trashed the ISO in the next sentence. And referred to Irix as a "weak oddball variant of Unix."
Seems pretty dumb to me.
doesn't agp have provisions for this for future generations? not to mention the added bus contention. have you ever seen a dumb s3 video card mounted on a motherboard? we have hp's at work with that setup, they use 1-2 mb main memory. ungodly slow.
Who said divirsity is good? Too much diversity is a sign of weakness.
:)
... odd ball variants of Unix be culled.
So you must just love Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" vision
Let the weak
Oh, you mean variants like Linux? Linux may have quickly achieved "coolest thing since sliced bread" status, but compared to the commercial *nixs it's still a toy - there's a lot of work still to do.
At the risk of offence (none intended, of course!), the only compelling feature Linux offers over commercial *nix implementations is its low absolute price. On virtually every other level - filesystems, security, accounting, stability, compatibility - it lags behind.
Let's work together to catch up.
Cheers
Alastair
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
Aren't they just protecting themselves by covering all the bases?
:)
They're selling NT graphics workstations cuz they fear that NT will take over... now they fear (rightfully) that Linux will kill NT
Meanwhile SGI's going down the tubes. From a corportate standpoint, they haven't been doing so well.
Why is it that every time Linux replaces another version of Unix, it gets described as a great blow to NT? Growing by cannibalizing the Unix market is not the same thing as growing by taking market share from NT.
Cripes, would some people get it into their head that linux being the `only' unix would be a disaster?
:)
An operating system that works closely with custom and specialist hardware (eg high end Irix) is worlds
away from low-mid end systems serving generic functions over a heterogenous hardware mix (ie Linux).
SGI is being clever, and Sun and IBM should follow suite. They make their money on hardware and Unix
tuned for fighting at the high end..they don't want to fight with NT for the low end. On the other
hand linux wants to be hot on the desktop and right in Microsofts face!
No one operating system can span both systems. It isn't worth writing linux for a 1024 CPU SGI monster
or a horror Sun or IBM mainframe...they are too rare. On the other hand they should encourage
Linux, running on their hardware, to become a desktop workstation powerhouse and halt the
encroachment of NT.
Long live AIX, Solaris, Irix and the lean and mean windows killer Linux. On the other hand SCO competes
directly in the same marketplace and should bend over for a good kicking
Lots of Windows users I know don't pay for anything either. That has less to do with the operating system than the financial ability of the individual.
Companies (like the Canadian National Railway) that deploy Linux DO pay for stuff. Certainly the people who would be buying expensive SGI boxes pay for stuff.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I hope we see from SGI a series of Intel based machines, moving further away from the 20-year-old PC architecture. The need for legacy support is dropping drastically these days, not to mention a product like VMWare can do a significant job of hiding the non-standard hardware from legacy applications.
The visual workstations are a good first step.
Of course SGI beat Apple to making trendy looking computers by ten years too.
On a side note, did anyone else see the story on here a half hour ago about the glowing mice? Where'd it go?
Irix seems to be very scalable. For example, their flagship Origin 2000 has up to 128 CPUs, and even on the CRAY supercomputers Irix is an option.
In other words, SGI has a lot of experience in large systems, and this is what Linux needs to get into the coporate market.
Beside that, supporting Linux would mean that they port OpenGL, OpenInventor and all the other nice graphic APIs to Linux. And as SGI owns Alias|Wavefront, Linux would probably get high-end rendering and design software as well.
Another interresting thing to note is that AFAIK some time ago SGI announced to abandon the MIPS cpus in the long term (they already sold MIPS) and to switch to intel's IA-64 architecture. The article said that Linux would become their only Unix-like OS on intels, so this would mean that Linux would be their primary operating system, unless they really want to use NT on their high-end servers. Whoa..
SGI's embrace of Linux is good news. No doubt SGI will, over time, roll some of the more advanced features of Irix over into Linux. This means they don't have to port Irix to x86 and we get some nice, powerful features. Double win.
Now the question is: what advanced features does Irix have that Linux could benefit from? What might Linux gain from this? How's the filesystem? The NFS implementation?
I work with Linux and Solaris, so I can't comment on specifics. Who out there is familiar with Irix?
--Lenny
Between the Department of Justice well... bringing down Justice and the growth of the Everyone But Microsoft movement, it seems that the horn of armageddon has already come for Microsoft. There's simply too much clout behind the opposition for a company of 15,000 people to deal with-- even one with inflated stock prices and bottom lines.
While their death is far from assured, they have already lost the war: an inferior product can stay ahead in the market only as long as no alternatives are realistic. In the operating system business, this means a lack of applications. If you think apps are starting to come now that we're at the 10-15 million user base, just wait until we're at the 100 million point... Where you go to the computer store and see the "Linux games" and "Linux applications" sections in the front, and all of the legacy Windows apps in bargain baskets and huddled off in the corner with the Mac section.
On another note, it'll be nice to have better 3D support under Linux. And it'll be nice to watch the proprietary unices pour their features into the Linux kernel. It'll be even nicer if they keep a decent-sized number of full-time Linux hackers out there in the name of "furthering company interest" in the operating system (read: Support for better 3d acceleration, etc).
The future is bright indeed.
Keep hacking.
I don't really think IRIX will disappear until Linux has assimilated all of those nice features IRIX has and Linux doesn't. This move is much more about finding a replacement for NT than finding a replacement for IRIX.
Think about it: SGI have put ten years (or however long it is) into IRIX, and they have made it into one of the best Unices around, particularly in some particular areas. Those areas are where SGI has been targeting their sales. They have far too much committed to IRIX now for them to just give up on it and move to Linux, particularly when they know that Linux in no way compares in the really high end, where they have been targeting alot of their stuff.
What we probably will see is SGI taking the stuff that they want from IRIX and putting it in Linux, things like (hopefully) good smp, improved graphics, etc. But that will take several years, most likely, and at the end of it they will still have lots of stuff that they either didn't or couldn't, for one reason or another, include in Linux. That stuff will be where IRIX comes in, probably on the really high end hardware, and in really specialised applications where they have been developing IRIX for years. They will want to leverage their current technologies in their Linux strategy, but the fact that Linux is Open Source means that there will be some things that they won't want to give away.
I imagine that all the current proprietary Unices will go that way, marginalised by Linux but still worth enough to their creators to keep around. The only problem with that is that I can see Linux heading towards an incredible amount of "creeping featurism" down that road, as all the Unix vendors try to make use of Linux for their own things, by shifting their technologies from their own Unices to Linux.
How well all this comes out in the end will depend entirely on how well the Linux Kernel developers can maintain control, and how well Linus can filter out the best bits of the proprietary technologies and integrate them into Linux. If he can do a really good job, I reckon Linux will end up being the yardstick by which every other OS in existence is measured. If Linux absorbs the best of everything, then we'll have an incredible base to start with when it's time to develop the next great OS (Unix is great, but will it cope with things like quantum computing, say? Probably not, so we _will_ need a new type of OS in the future).
May Linus, and Linux, Live Long and Prosper!
. . . just the ramblings of a sick mind at two thirty in the morning . . .
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Let's try an experimental rephrasing of the above:
Linux (a low end UNIX) doesn't compete with SGI (producer of a high end UNIX). In fact, Linux is a nice cheap development platform, and a nice client for IRIX based larger systems.
By incorporating Linux as their low end offering, SGI can flatten the development model and produce a more seamless interface for integrating features into their higher end offerings. Plus, they can sell more cheap Intel hardware without having to give money to Redmond by bundling NT on it.
Linux and Irix don't compete, any more than Ford trucks and Ferrari's compete.
Uhh, yeah. That's why I don't have a fleet of old macintoshes dating from 1984 to 1994. Wnd why I don't have multiple purchased copies of word, excel, foxpro, billing software, bankruptcy software, and gaggles more that I can't think of. All told, several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a year on software.
I stuck with mac's to continue using word 5.1, as 6+ femoved features that I depended upon (reasonable equation editing, usable mailmerge). Then I stumbled across Lyx, and it's equation facitilies.
While I would probably have purchased an X86 with windows by then if word hadn't changed from an excellent program to a disaster, price and ideology had *nothing* to do with my switching to linux. I bought the linux box because what lyx could do was flatly better then what was available for mac or windows. The part about never crashing (a year and a half on this machine, and another year or two on another cobbled from spare parts before that, though macbsd did kernel-panic once in the several months I used it) is a *bonus*.
I am not anti-microsoft. As an anti-trust attorney, I think they're in deep trouble, but that's a legal issue. I'm not even averse to buying their software. But the last software I saw from them that was worth paying for was word5.1 and excel 4. Nothing I've seen from them since has been worthwhile, even if it were free.
Cheering for the fact that SGI may have "knuckled under" may be a premature thing to do.
Is it ever a good thing when there are fewer choices in the world? If SGI eventually throws in the towel with Irix, it just means that Linux is doing what Microsoft hopes it will do:
Killing off all the commercial Unices.
I have grown beyond an "anti-Microsoft" stance to the point where I feel that it's just silly to base your core philosopy on 'anti-' anything as the starting point. Diversity is good. That means it's bad whenever any OS is driven from the marketplace. Including OSes you can't buy from Cheapbytes for $1.99.
The "Open Source" movement isn't fascist, unless it starts claim it is the ONLY model for software development. Then it gets frighteningly similar to one-party Communism (some theorize that the only way Communism can ever succeed is if it takes over the whole world, and that this fact leads to it's defeat) I'm not trying to slam "open source" initiatives, because it can be and is a good thing at present. It's NOT EVER going to take over the entire market. Watch out for people who claim it is. They're the Lenin/Stalin types humanity always has to watch out for.
If you think about it they have been planning this a while. Some of thier internal developers have been submitting Kernel patches for a while. The day the 2.2 kernel hit the mirrors support for the Visual Workstation. Now you can run X on the VWS (unaccelerated). They release GLX as Open Source then with redhat started funding precision insight to developent key parts of the new Xfree86 4.0.
SGI really understands Linux and OpenSource and is one of the Greatest Things to happen to linux.
With all that said do you still wonder why Micros~1 is getting scared.
Let me break this down.
Many years ago UNIX started fragmenting. Vender's started maintaining there own versions of UNIX. Do you realize how much this costs? big bucks. Imagine spending some money and porting some inhouse (proven and feature rich) to an OpenSource platform with most basic (if not all) system tools. This can really help SGI focus on what they do best. Incredible hardware.
But it may take a while.
Inorder for them to relase alot of thier code it has to cleaned up (remove parts licensed by other companys... if nes.). I heard this is moving right along.
I don't know that is just my opinion i could be wrong.
Linux (a piece of software) doesn't compete with SGI (a hardware manufacturer that happens to write software). Continued development of Irix just eats at SGI's bottom line. If they can get a high performance OS more cheaply by contributing to Linux, then it makes good business sense to do so. I know they're not abandoning Irix at this point, but they will when Linux offers everthing Irix does (say three years?).
By adopting Linux, SGI is 1/strengthening Linux on high-end hardware, 2/adding to the momentum of the Linux bandwagon, 3/providing more installed seats for Linux which means more applications will be ported 4/making expensive SGI boxes a natural migration path for cheap Intel boxes.
The only major Unix vendor that doesn't stand to benefit from the broad acceptance of Linux is SCO. And, surprise, they are the only major Unix vendor that hasn't come out in support of Linux. I have no idea how they think they're going to compete in the long term.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow