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I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer. Not that I'm bad mouthing linux, but I blame it for the death of both Solaris and IRIX. Looking forwa

I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer. Not that I'm bad mouthing linux, but I blame it for the death of both Solaris and IRIX. Looking forward to see preempt_rt merged. This will certainly put a lot of pressure on QNX and VxWorks in the future.

sgt 4y ago
Linux didn't kill Solaris alone. Sun Microsystems started doing that (as much as we loved Sun), and then Oracle put the lid on the coffin.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Once Linux was mature enough to do all the shared hosting tasks Solaris previously owned, using dirt cheap commodity PCs, Sun was finished.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    They had some good tech they could have leveraged if they wanted to. OpenSolaris just came too late, was released too slowly and used an organisation which was too complex and made little sense to the community. Sun demised is actually a brilliant case study of what a good engineering company shouldn't do. Great products all around, aweful commercial strategy and corporate leadership.
    - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
      > Great products all around It would help them a lot if their products did not commoditize their own products as well.
raesene9 4y ago
For me, one of the main reasons that Linux replaced proprietary Unix in a lot of places is, ease of learning. It's simple and cheap to get started with Linux and as a result there are lots of people who know about it, so it's very easy to hire people with Linux skills. In comparison, getting started with Solaris/HPUX/AIX can be expensive, you might need a physical workstation, getting patches without paying might be tricky etc. Mainframes have the same problem. I tried to learn more about mainframe security back in the early 2000's and it was really difficult to get any access to a mainframe to practice/look at things, despite working for a large bank which had multiple mainframes.
- wrldos 4y ago
  Not so sure. I learned commercial Unix back in the late 1990s on discarded SPARC hardware which was available in skips and Yahoo auctions for virtually no money at all. In fact it was generally cheaper than the boxed Linux distributions you had to spend on because you only had a dialup. The killer with the commercial Unixes is that the documentation was orders of magnitude better. That is true today still as well. Most Linux knowledge I have to sift through today is obtained from dubious quality manpages, partially incomplete or out of date documentation and random blog posts.
  - raesene9 4y ago
    I'm not sure free/cheap Unix workstations are a ubiquitous experience (indeed I don't think I've ever seen a skipped working Unix box!) Late 90's was good for SPARCs but I spent a load of time looking out for AIX kit and it was seriously hard to come by, without spending a lot of money. Also, even if that works for individual hobbyists, it doesn't scale to things like University courses. There having Linux means it's easy and cheap to teach unix-like setups. Whilst top-end universities might be able to kit out labs with Unix workstations, it's been much cheaper to setup labs with PCs and Linux for a long time. So Universities will churn out thousands of people familiar with Linux tooling every year, leading to easier hiring leading to more companies adopting Linux.
- fps_doug 4y ago
  This is what I think. It's the old business model, which worked when everything was expensive, only really needed by big corps with deep pockets, and any machine a teen would have at home had nothing in common with the big irons at some insurance company. IBM would make big money, consulting firms would make big money, you being good with AIX would make big money. Then with Linux, you could have what could run on any big server, for free, as a teen in your bedroom. You could poke at everything, look at the source code, ask around how you do this or that, since knowing how to do X wasn't some well-guarded secret to have an advantage over the competition, but something fun to share. Eventually those teens would get older and look for jobs or go to university, while at the same time Linux keeps on maturing, and now if you as a company want to build some system from the ground up, or just replace something ancient, you can pick that expensive well-established system from IBM, requiring expensive experts to maintain them, and program for them, expensive software, ... or go with that free OS that a lot of people know their way around with and ask for a much lower salary. Of course, this didn't happen over night, especially the "it's free but there is nobody to yell it if it breaks" aspect of open source was very strange to $BIGCORP and seen as an unacceptable risk, but there was a steady shift towards that, also in large parts because it was pioneered by all those late 90s/early 2000s tech startups that were exactly created by those "Linux teens". Because that's what you tinkered with in college, not some proprietary OS that you couldn't even afford, or get updates for, or ask anyone for help if you got stuck.
zozbot234 4y ago
Aren't QNX and VxWorks intended for hard RT workloads? I'm not sure the PREEMPT_RT patchset goes that far. One thing that Linux is doing, albeit only in makeshift, uncoordinated fashion, is making userspace μkernel-like implementation possible for things that used to be exclusive to the kernel. Combine this with full "containerization"/namespacing of all kernel interfaces, live snapshotting and migration of containerized workloads, maybe distributed shared memory allowing for even multiple threads of a single process to be run seamlessly on the same or different nodes with full location independence. This gives you pretty much everything that network-distributed OS's were designed to do in the 1990s, and allows Linux to extend seamlessly from small embedded to datacenter-scale workloads that used to be exclusive to proprietary OS's.
- spyremeown 4y ago
  And to add: the footprint of devices running Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patches is generally much greater than the footprint of a device running something like VxWorks. WindRiver actually has its own PREEMPT_RTed distribution[1]. [1] https://www.windriver.com/products/linux https://www.windriver.com/products/linux
pjmlp 4y ago
Ironically is that it only got there, because many UNIX vendors saw in it a way to reduce their own UNIX development costs, thus helping in the process to kill their own products.
emmelaich 4y ago
HP-UX too. Though I think Irix and HP-UX were both mostly dead at the time Linux was ascendant in the enterprise. i.e. 2004 ish
- Stranger43 4y ago
  HP-UX is kind of an interesting tale in that it's always been underrepresented in the enthusiast community, perhaps because HPE never tried to put up hpux on intanium as an alternative to Linux on proliant, or maybe because it's core market seems to have been in the manufacturing sector where it supplanted hp3000 minicomputers and ran boring logistics software and factory control systems and never really made it big in education, research nor web hosting. by 2004 HPUX was actually pulling off an successful migration from PA-Risc to Itanium and it lived on profitable for over a decade after that until HPE finally published an Roadmap for when they were going to end HPUX development which is currently scheduled to happen around 2025/26 with the last new itanium systems sold around 2018. Irix was killed off by windows around the time the pc industry up with SGI's graphics capabilities. And i cant recall what happened to digital's true64(but it never really survived the merger of DEC into first Compaq and then HP).
  - dekhn 4y ago
    tru64 fully survived the merger of DEC into Compaq and then HP; the enterprise I work for had one of (if not the) largest trucluster in the world until not that long ago, and HP fully supported it. Migrating folks off it to linux wasn't easy, as the system had wonderful properties. Oracle took the cluster tech and added it to oracle.
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    Itanium was a dead platform on launch. When HP didn't port HPUX to x86_64, it decided HPUX was dead... They do occasionally put out OS updates for those unlucky to have bought into it, but if your software can run on another OS, I can't really think of another reason to keep the hardware around.
fkgmeqnb 4y ago
> I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer For the server market, completely agree. But for the workstation/desktop, not so much, with macOS being the last viable alternative, which is still being developed.
Kukumber 4y ago
linux didn't kill solaris, Oracle and its greedy execs did, stop trying to rewrite history
- msla 4y ago
  Solaris was fading into irrelevance before Sun got bought by Oracle. Sun's open-sourcing of Solaris probably extended its lifespan but Oracle isn't what turned it into a niche platform.
sys_64738 4y ago
The market segments changed when business realized you didn't need to spend $$$$ on expensive UNIX hardware when cheap x86 systems for $ could do the same thing. It's just market dynamics changed.
exabrial 4y ago
There’s room in the market for a commercially supported *Nix. Linux is ‘good enough’ for a lot of people, but it’s interface is inconsistent (something a lot of OSes suffer from). A set of tools were all of the commands used the same argument structure in the same order would be hugely beneficial. This is just my opinion.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Something like red hat cough ibm?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robin_reala 4y ago
  It exists: it’s macOS.
justin66 4y ago
Nvidia killed SGI, and incidentally killed IRIX.
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  Rick Beluzzo killed SGI, then went ''home'' to Microsoft a hero. /s
  - justin66 4y ago
    That’s a name I hadn’t seen in a while. When you browse his Wikipedia page and see “succeeded Ed McCracken,” the initial impression is well, how bad could he be?

sgt 4y ago

Linux didn't kill Solaris alone. Sun Microsystems started doing that (as much as we loved Sun), and then Oracle put the lid on the coffin.

pengaru 4y ago
Once Linux was mature enough to do all the shared hosting tasks Solaris previously owned, using dirt cheap commodity PCs, Sun was finished.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  They had some good tech they could have leveraged if they wanted to. OpenSolaris just came too late, was released too slowly and used an organisation which was too complex and made little sense to the community. Sun demised is actually a brilliant case study of what a good engineering company shouldn't do. Great products all around, aweful commercial strategy and corporate leadership.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > Great products all around It would help them a lot if their products did not commoditize their own products as well.

raesene9 4y ago

For me, one of the main reasons that Linux replaced proprietary Unix in a lot of places is, ease of learning. It's simple and cheap to get started with Linux and as a result there are lots of people who know about it, so it's very easy to hire people with Linux skills. In comparison, getting started with Solaris/HPUX/AIX can be expensive, you might need a physical workstation, getting patches without paying might be tricky etc. Mainframes have the same problem. I tried to learn more about mainframe security back in the early 2000's and it was really difficult to get any access to a mainframe to practice/look at things, despite working for a large bank which had multiple mainframes.

wrldos 4y ago
Not so sure. I learned commercial Unix back in the late 1990s on discarded SPARC hardware which was available in skips and Yahoo auctions for virtually no money at all. In fact it was generally cheaper than the boxed Linux distributions you had to spend on because you only had a dialup. The killer with the commercial Unixes is that the documentation was orders of magnitude better. That is true today still as well. Most Linux knowledge I have to sift through today is obtained from dubious quality manpages, partially incomplete or out of date documentation and random blog posts.
- raesene9 4y ago
  I'm not sure free/cheap Unix workstations are a ubiquitous experience (indeed I don't think I've ever seen a skipped working Unix box!) Late 90's was good for SPARCs but I spent a load of time looking out for AIX kit and it was seriously hard to come by, without spending a lot of money. Also, even if that works for individual hobbyists, it doesn't scale to things like University courses. There having Linux means it's easy and cheap to teach unix-like setups. Whilst top-end universities might be able to kit out labs with Unix workstations, it's been much cheaper to setup labs with PCs and Linux for a long time. So Universities will churn out thousands of people familiar with Linux tooling every year, leading to easier hiring leading to more companies adopting Linux.
fps_doug 4y ago
This is what I think. It's the old business model, which worked when everything was expensive, only really needed by big corps with deep pockets, and any machine a teen would have at home had nothing in common with the big irons at some insurance company. IBM would make big money, consulting firms would make big money, you being good with AIX would make big money. Then with Linux, you could have what could run on any big server, for free, as a teen in your bedroom. You could poke at everything, look at the source code, ask around how you do this or that, since knowing how to do X wasn't some well-guarded secret to have an advantage over the competition, but something fun to share. Eventually those teens would get older and look for jobs or go to university, while at the same time Linux keeps on maturing, and now if you as a company want to build some system from the ground up, or just replace something ancient, you can pick that expensive well-established system from IBM, requiring expensive experts to maintain them, and program for them, expensive software, ... or go with that free OS that a lot of people know their way around with and ask for a much lower salary. Of course, this didn't happen over night, especially the "it's free but there is nobody to yell it if it breaks" aspect of open source was very strange to $BIGCORP and seen as an unacceptable risk, but there was a steady shift towards that, also in large parts because it was pioneered by all those late 90s/early 2000s tech startups that were exactly created by those "Linux teens". Because that's what you tinkered with in college, not some proprietary OS that you couldn't even afford, or get updates for, or ask anyone for help if you got stuck.

zozbot234 4y ago

Aren't QNX and VxWorks intended for hard RT workloads? I'm not sure the PREEMPT_RT patchset goes that far. One thing that Linux is doing, albeit only in makeshift, uncoordinated fashion, is making userspace μkernel-like implementation possible for things that used to be exclusive to the kernel. Combine this with full "containerization"/namespacing of all kernel interfaces, live snapshotting and migration of containerized workloads, maybe distributed shared memory allowing for even multiple threads of a single process to be run seamlessly on the same or different nodes with full location independence. This gives you pretty much everything that network-distributed OS's were designed to do in the 1990s, and allows Linux to extend seamlessly from small embedded to datacenter-scale workloads that used to be exclusive to proprietary OS's.

spyremeown 4y ago
And to add: the footprint of devices running Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patches is generally much greater than the footprint of a device running something like VxWorks. WindRiver actually has its own PREEMPT_RTed distribution[1]. [1] https://www.windriver.com/products/linux https://www.windriver.com/products/linux

pjmlp 4y ago

Ironically is that it only got there, because many UNIX vendors saw in it a way to reduce their own UNIX development costs, thus helping in the process to kill their own products.

emmelaich 4y ago

HP-UX too. Though I think Irix and HP-UX were both mostly dead at the time Linux was ascendant in the enterprise. i.e. 2004 ish

Stranger43 4y ago
HP-UX is kind of an interesting tale in that it's always been underrepresented in the enthusiast community, perhaps because HPE never tried to put up hpux on intanium as an alternative to Linux on proliant, or maybe because it's core market seems to have been in the manufacturing sector where it supplanted hp3000 minicomputers and ran boring logistics software and factory control systems and never really made it big in education, research nor web hosting. by 2004 HPUX was actually pulling off an successful migration from PA-Risc to Itanium and it lived on profitable for over a decade after that until HPE finally published an Roadmap for when they were going to end HPUX development which is currently scheduled to happen around 2025/26 with the last new itanium systems sold around 2018. Irix was killed off by windows around the time the pc industry up with SGI's graphics capabilities. And i cant recall what happened to digital's true64(but it never really survived the merger of DEC into first Compaq and then HP).
- dekhn 4y ago
  tru64 fully survived the merger of DEC into Compaq and then HP; the enterprise I work for had one of (if not the) largest trucluster in the world until not that long ago, and HP fully supported it. Migrating folks off it to linux wasn't easy, as the system had wonderful properties. Oracle took the cluster tech and added it to oracle.
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  Itanium was a dead platform on launch. When HP didn't port HPUX to x86_64, it decided HPUX was dead... They do occasionally put out OS updates for those unlucky to have bought into it, but if your software can run on another OS, I can't really think of another reason to keep the hardware around.

fkgmeqnb 4y ago

> I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer For the server market, completely agree. But for the workstation/desktop, not so much, with macOS being the last viable alternative, which is still being developed.

Kukumber 4y ago

linux didn't kill solaris, Oracle and its greedy execs did, stop trying to rewrite history

msla 4y ago
Solaris was fading into irrelevance before Sun got bought by Oracle. Sun's open-sourcing of Solaris probably extended its lifespan but Oracle isn't what turned it into a niche platform.

sys_64738 4y ago

The market segments changed when business realized you didn't need to spend $$$$ on expensive UNIX hardware when cheap x86 systems for $ could do the same thing. It's just market dynamics changed.

exabrial 4y ago

There’s room in the market for a commercially supported *Nix. Linux is ‘good enough’ for a lot of people, but it’s interface is inconsistent (something a lot of OSes suffer from). A set of tools were all of the commands used the same argument structure in the same order would be hugely beneficial. This is just my opinion.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
Something like red hat cough ibm?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 4y ago
It exists: it’s macOS.

justin66 4y ago

Nvidia killed SGI, and incidentally killed IRIX.

cf100clunk 4y ago
Rick Beluzzo killed SGI, then went ''home'' to Microsoft a hero. /s
- justin66 4y ago
  That’s a name I hadn’t seen in a while. When you browse his Wikipedia page and see “succeeded Ed McCracken,” the initial impression is well, how bad could he be?