Unix on the way out? Not by a long shot.

Think beyond just purchase costs.

Our shop did a OS support cost comparison between RedHat and Solaris; based on our analysis (for our situation) it wasn't worth ditching Solaris.

Yes, we would save a few bucks, but would lose ZFS filesystem and DTrace, two Solaris features that we depend on a lot.

Sun Sparc iron costs more than Intel/AMD too, so should you ditch Sun iron? During our last (planned) power outage we had hardware failures (cpu, memory) in about 7% of our older "famous name" Intel servers; our older Sun Sparc boxes came back up with zero systems failures.

For us, Sparc+Solaris makes a nice midpoint between "commodity iron" and "mainframe iron".

... about lazy and ill informed journos at The Inq.

Couple of points:
1) *BSD FOSS operating systems are all built on the aprox 95% of BSD UNIX source code that was released lo those many years ago. To say these are not UNIX is foolish.
2) Linux is not UNIX in legal terms. But it just happens to conform to every convention and API that UNIX standards mandate. So, I say Linux may as well be UNIX.
3) Commercial UNICES include many extensions that 'classic' SYSV or BSD did not include... what therefore should qualify as UNIX?
4) One might argue that true UNIX has advanced file systems or partitioning or isolation of application's address space or CPU allocation or what have you. However none of that was in original UNIX: so where is the true UNIX?
5) UNIX was originally designed as a multiuser/single-machine OS for isolated computers. Remember, TCPIP was bolted on rather late in the game. So really none of the current UNICES on the market can be called UNIX in a true believer sense.
6) Before POSIX, UNIX versions had diverged considerably. Some years after POSIX they had converged somewhat and have continued to do so. Therefore we might not properly speak of UNIX at all: should we not speak of the 'POSIC OS'?

Thus, the best one might be able to say is that 'UNIX' non-qua copyright, qua a school of thought and common functionality, ***is a family of operating systems*** that share a number of common charactreristics.

Using on-going revenue can be misleading.

(a) Systems are much cheaper today.
A 64-way E10k 10 years ago cost 1000 $k. A 256-way T5440 goes for about 100 $k. Way more for way less.

(b) Unix server are being kept in production much longer than the 3 or 4 years that was common in the 90's and early 2000's.

The quality of UNIX servers built in the 2000's is high. There is wide availability of cheap 3rd party maintenance (as well as do-it-yourself with parts from eBay) -- making it easy and cheap to keep UNIX servers in production for 5-10 years. Many old UNIX customers upgraded because they neeed the faster servers and they did not want gear in production that was at "end-of-life" or "end-of-service-life".

Farrell writes his common Scheisse. Obviously, ignorant what systems are Unix based/variants/compatible.

Even more ignorant about "big tin". No, x86 won't replace systems based on IBM Power-CPUs. These are high-availablity, high bandwidth systems running specialized applications. They may be expensive, but they are more efficient and reliable than full rack of cheap x86 junk. And those systems aren't going to be Windows based anytime soon, if ever.

There is actually one loser, however, it's not Unix, it's Itanic.

BTW, if Farrell has to write something, put him in toilet cubicle, give him pen and let him write on the wall.

It is a UNIX-like operating system, that happens to be POSIX-compliant, but it is not descended from UNIX in any way. It descended from a hacked kernel Linus wrote, with inspiration drawn from MINIX.

Real UNIX is System V, and BSD. Different commercial UNIXes started out under one parent or the other (Solaris, for example, started out as BSD, then adoped a lot of System V bits. Even now, although most Solaris sysadmins use System V-style "ps -ef", the BSD variant is still available as "/usr/ucb/ps -aux".)

System V-style userland is actually a topic very few Linux admins know about, and many of them fumble when they encounter an OS like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX or SCO. I find this funny, because the convention used for the ps command in Linux is actually System V.

UNIX dead? Not likely. I work in an IT department and all our servers are running AIX. Even the new ones that we will be putting in are AIX because it is just more reliable comparing to PC platform. I think why the HW shipping is lower is due to virtualization. However, when the performance is critical, there will be no virtual server.

"The Power series can be bought with Linux preinstalled, ya know."

Sure in theory you can boot it up, but you will be wasting lots of money because Linux does not take advantage of all that fancy hardware.

And the pickings are slim when it comes to application support. Red Hat, etc. won't touch you.

You are MUCH better off running AIX on your POWER7 box. Many of them cost six figures so who is going to quibble about an AIX license?

I bet you have never even actually laid eyes on an IBM Power box.

What is the motivation for this article? Is it a) the kickbacks Microsoft keep paying you, b) the fact that UNIX forms the core of MacOS which everybody knows you love so much, c) both or d) a complete lack of basic journalistic research of the sort I called you out for on your 17 year old bug story prompting you to go la la la, stick your fingers in your ears and delete the comment? You wouldn't last 5 minutes in a real journalism job. In fact I find it difficult to imagine you lasting more than a week serving big macs.

Good laugh. Oh and Mainframes are dead too. I think what many see as dead are usually large robust systems that are extremly reliable. So not very many are purchased at least not in high volumes. One problem in your logic is just about every large company runs a flavor of Unix and yes even a mainframe. What do you think all of the largest databases run on? Every time you look up a UPS tracking number you just hit a mainframe DB2 backend.

Or what about Unix in telecomms, Barracuda, Ironport, Juniper, Bluecoat are only of a little of network devices based on FreeBSD = Unix, lot of network devices like routers, switches or others are based on some BSD or Unix network stack and they're growing every day a lot, this post is based in missing information on how Unix is being used in different areas other than servers.

And in fact seeing as Unix is still seeing major enhancements and becoming more efficient (well, in some areas), while Windows seems to be stalling in features and increasing in hardware demands, I do wonder...

This is really a silly article, UNIX isn't going away any time soon. First of all, Linux is basically UNIX. Second, every Mac runs UNIX. Third, many embedded systems developers prefer BSD variants to Linux because their kernels are are so much more compact and secure.

I guess the author is using UNIX to mean "proprietary enterprise unix", because only by narrowing it down to that extreme does this article seem in the least bit accurate.

No

The Power series can be bought with Linux preinstalled, ya know. If the hardware's market share is changing, that's just an issue of the balance point between high-end systems and clusters of low-end systems.

This sort of thing happens all the time. People start spouting "Unix is dead!" without actually understanding what Unix is.

Linux is a variant of Unix. As is OSX. They're most decidedly NOT dead.

By the same token, one could argue that Unix was dead a LONG time ago. All that's left is Solaris, HPUX, Irix(?), Linux, OSX, Aix, BSD, possibly SCO if you want to stretch the boundaries of civility.... etc, etc.

It's like saying "CARS ARE DEAD" because Saturn went out of business. There are still plenty of cars left, even if they look and act a bit different. They're still cars.

Let us be clear. Sun did not have the only 'Unix' operating system. Sun had the Solaris operating system which is based upon 'Unix.' Just like all the flavors of Linux are based upon 'Unix.' Look it up and you will see.

Now the author might make a case for the decline of Sun's Solaris and this may or may not be true. But to say Unix is in decline when so many flavors of it are in use in so many devices, from computers to phones to GPS systems, can not be seen as true.

Since when is corporate a noun? What does it mean? Should Nick Farrell sign up for an ESL course?

pretty much all OS out there are either MS windows, UNIX or some experimental OS (distributed kernels, stateless machines, etc).

UNIX is a family of OS's

Linux is Unix, in the same way a ford F150 is a truck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.en.svg

shows all the branches of UNIX, I think what the article is saying is that sysVr4 branch of unix is dying (solaris/aix/hpux).

Nicely done, Nick. Good derivation, skillful aggregation.

Dudes the author is saying that Unix is dying, not Linux. Which makes perfect sense as many old Unix farms are moving over to Linux.

Please understand that Linux (which Android is based on) and OpenBSD (which OSX is based on) do indeed borrow many concepts from Unix, but are in fact not just versions of UNIX.

oh yeah!, every single one of the 75 millions iPhone/iPod touch sold so far, since 2007, run UNIX my friend.
Not to mention the millions and millions Mac OS X machines out there.

UNIX dead? No way!

...no, Linux is in your phone, not Unix. Android and WebOS are two examples of Linux under the hood.

Here's the "cat /proc/version" from my Palm Pre WebOS 1.3.5.1:

Linux version 2.6.24-palm-joplin-3430 (na@na) (gcc version 4.2.1 (CodeSourcery Sourcery G++ Lite 2007q3-51)) #1 276

Last time I checked, Unix was not in use with ARM-based mobile CPUs. Linux has the best ARM repository and makes far far more sense than licensing a major Unix version. Besides, Unix runs mostly on x86, POWER, and SPARC. ARM is not a major part of any Unix distribution that I'm aware of; at least not in the sense of ARM Cortex-9/11 series CPUs.

Why Is It Dosn't seem Likely too many Penguins will Be On Lose In Power 7 cells anytime soon, unles gonna write it, which is why ibm cobol becomes UNIX, because NoOne can write it.

Yet, Peng still has Get Even Spot. click click it. Sorry nO High Trills Avaiable. Just Clicks. Feel Mouse & thrid wheel. Lightly Click out Penquin Code. Kinda fast to hear Raspiness of Peng. Ahso, USB mouse can have flashing lights, Wow, Need That For TRUE Unix, I Bet. Get In With 'da RAY. SIG

Linux is effectively another flavour of Unix. As such, Unix is very much not on the way out. Unix is in your phones (iPhone, Android). You interact with Unix machine every day (Google, Amazon, etc.) Every day, more and more specialized devices come out, and they're all running Unix - iPad, Kindle, etc.

Rather than suggesting Unix is on the way out, it would make more sense to suggest *Windows* is on the way out.

Aw fer crying out loud, not *another* 'UNIX is dead!' chicken-little. I've been seeing these for, what, two decades now?

I guess every tech reporter who doesn't use Unix has to do one. Wake me in ten years when you do your 'Why Unix didn't die' story.

If it works don't fix it.
Unless you have to upgrade your bloatware cos some tosser in admin got vista or w7 and everything else has to follow suit then your not really going to be into buying more servers.
Its not on its way out - just working for the owner not the parasite