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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.
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.
Too simple. SGI is in the process of moving their low-end boxes to x86. The original plan was to replace Irix with NT on these boxes.
Some customers want Unix, however, so they are going to offer Linux as an option (not a replacement for NT) on these boxes.
Which OS a SGI customer chooses probably depends more on which applications they need to run rather than their particular ideology. Right now, the engineering and 3D apps are more prevelent on NT than Linux. So you'd expect most of the boxes to have NT.
But even optimistically assuming the boxes go out 50% NT and 50% Linux, it's still a smaller marketshare for Unix relative to last year when they were 100% Irix.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yes, but even if SGI starts selling more workstations, they would need to double the growth of the entire market for their Unix marketshare to grow. (Assuming again 50/50 Windows/Unix split.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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