4 ms·

Somewhat on topic. Does anyone use actual Unix? Is it even something you can install anymore?

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

mattzito 9y ago
Absolutely, though it's a dying breed, and with the news of Solaris's EOL, accelerating all the time. BSD is the FOSS actual UNIX. On the commercial side there's AIX from IBM, HP-UX from HP, and probably a few other really niche-y ones I forget.
- _asummers 9y ago
  Illumos had a hard fork from Solaris in 2010 and many of the Solaris team are apparently involved in that project, Joyent uses their own UNIX for their hypervisor, too, if I recall correctly.
davidw 9y ago
His response about the 70ies is off. I used IRIX, Solaris, and a bit of AIX in the late 90ies. Still though... pretty silly stuff.
- auxym 9y ago
  As a unix sysadmin, my dad worked on tru64 in the 2000's. Mostly switched to linux/vmware in the last years before he retired though.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DeRock 9y ago
macOS is certified UNIX: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm
kev009 9y ago
You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX. As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO. I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.
- flukus 9y ago
  Could we crowd fund a campaign to buy a unix license for linux and end this silliness once and for all?
  - exikyut 9y ago
    A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful. I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay. But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset. So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI. Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch. NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
SteveNuts 9y ago
It's everywhere in large companies. I was a sysadmin in the internal managed services division of a healthcare company and we had AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (CentOS, Debian, RHEL), BSD, Open-VMS, and FreeBSD. We had about 150 Sysadmins to manage it all, a lot of the guys had been doing their respective OS's exclusively for 20+ years.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
Thank you everyone for the great replies. I learned a lot.
akhilcacharya 9y ago
Big company I worked for this summer still runs part of their infra on Solaris (I can say that because there are still job postings up...)

Somewhat on topic. Does anyone use actual Unix? Is it even something you can install anymore?

Absolutely, though it's a dying breed, and with the news of Solaris's EOL, accelerating all the time. BSD is the FOSS actual UNIX. On the commercial side there's AIX from IBM, HP-UX from HP, and probably a few other really niche-y ones I forget.

_asummers 9y ago
Illumos had a hard fork from Solaris in 2010 and many of the Solaris team are apparently involved in that project, Joyent uses their own UNIX for their hypervisor, too, if I recall correctly.

davidw 9y ago

His response about the 70ies is off. I used IRIX, Solaris, and a bit of AIX in the late 90ies. Still though... pretty silly stuff.

auxym 9y ago
As a unix sysadmin, my dad worked on tru64 in the 2000's. Mostly switched to linux/vmware in the last years before he retired though.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

DeRock 9y ago

macOS is certified UNIX: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm

kev009 9y ago

You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX. As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO. I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.

flukus 9y ago
Could we crowd fund a campaign to buy a unix license for linux and end this silliness once and for all?
- exikyut 9y ago
  A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful. I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay. But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset. So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI. Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch. NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.

SteveNuts 9y ago

It's everywhere in large companies. I was a sysadmin in the internal managed services division of a healthcare company and we had AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (CentOS, Debian, RHEL), BSD, Open-VMS, and FreeBSD. We had about 150 Sysadmins to manage it all, a lot of the guys had been doing their respective OS's exclusively for 20+ years.

throwaway2016a 9y ago

Thank you everyone for the great replies. I learned a lot.

akhilcacharya 9y ago

Big company I worked for this summer still runs part of their infra on Solaris (I can say that because there are still job postings up...)