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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 a

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 Most Linux knowledge I have to sift through today is obtained from dubious quality manpages, partially incomplete or out of date documentation and random blog posts.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
  > Then with Linux, you could have what could run on any big server, for free, as a teen in your bedroom. It took a long time to get there, though. Prior to the mid-to-late 1990s Linux was seen as a toy, and the upstart competitor to big proprietary Unix was Windows NT.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    the era you are describing had dozens and more, OS, hardware and software stacks.. Invention was ordinary. The massive user base today of a few platforms is the reverse situation.
  - 4y ago
Stranger43 4y ago
having gone from Linux to HPUX and now partially back to Linux as the OS i make my money supporting, im not sure the learning gap between Linux and Commercial Unix(tm) is big enough that there was ever a real problem training/recruiting Unix(tm) admins. I think the the real reason why Linux supplanted commercial Unix(tm) lies in the hardware market, around the time when Linux got good enough to compete directly with commercial Unix on stability we also saw the x86_64 systems getting good enough to complete with Power/Sparc/Itanium based systems on most workloads. And as the Hardware vendors challenging the commercial Unix market with cheaper Linux boxen, were often the same vendors who sold commercial Unix Boxen, the transition was often managed more then fought.
- raesene9 4y ago
  If you were willing to take Linux admins and cross-train, sure I could see that. But a lot of companies tend to ask for x years of actual experience with the product, and there's far more people with that in Linux than Any proprietary unix. The hardware is another factor too of course, the cheap X64 server being "good enough" inevitably moved people in that direction.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Wouldn't it be in these companies' best interest to release free "dev" versions of Solaris/HPUX/AIX/etc? I guess even then the problem is there's even a moat there to begin with. Company would have you fill out various info to get a license whereas you can download Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS without any such restriction. I also wonder about mainframes and why IBM hasn't come out with some sort of "emulation layer" for X86 machines. Yes mainframes are expensive, but wouldn't you want to do everything you can to get mainframe software that people can learn with into as many hands as possible?
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  In the context of the 1980s and early 1990s, there was an x86 version of Solaris 2.x that had drivers for a few of the commonplace PC hardware devices of the time, so perhaps the home hacker might have been able to take that up, but probably only through a school licence. The ''real'' Solaris OS as well as HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, OSF/1, etc. were written and developed for the proprietary hardware platforms of Sun, HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, DEC, respectively. The cost of those hardware devices kept them out of the home hacker's reach until used or EOL units started popping up many years later.
- accra4rx 4y ago
  you have emulation for mainframe on x86, they give you a free 3 days emulated development env on their cloud if you sign up or else you can buy ADCD license and install it locally. other alternative is to use Hercules as emulator (only works with old ADCD images)

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
> Then with Linux, you could have what could run on any big server, for free, as a teen in your bedroom. It took a long time to get there, though. Prior to the mid-to-late 1990s Linux was seen as a toy, and the upstart competitor to big proprietary Unix was Windows NT.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  the era you are describing had dozens and more, OS, hardware and software stacks.. Invention was ordinary. The massive user base today of a few platforms is the reverse situation.
- 4y ago

Stranger43 4y ago

having gone from Linux to HPUX and now partially back to Linux as the OS i make my money supporting, im not sure the learning gap between Linux and Commercial Unix(tm) is big enough that there was ever a real problem training/recruiting Unix(tm) admins. I think the the real reason why Linux supplanted commercial Unix(tm) lies in the hardware market, around the time when Linux got good enough to compete directly with commercial Unix on stability we also saw the x86_64 systems getting good enough to complete with Power/Sparc/Itanium based systems on most workloads. And as the Hardware vendors challenging the commercial Unix market with cheaper Linux boxen, were often the same vendors who sold commercial Unix Boxen, the transition was often managed more then fought.

raesene9 4y ago
If you were willing to take Linux admins and cross-train, sure I could see that. But a lot of companies tend to ask for x years of actual experience with the product, and there's far more people with that in Linux than Any proprietary unix. The hardware is another factor too of course, the cheap X64 server being "good enough" inevitably moved people in that direction.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Wouldn't it be in these companies' best interest to release free "dev" versions of Solaris/HPUX/AIX/etc? I guess even then the problem is there's even a moat there to begin with. Company would have you fill out various info to get a license whereas you can download Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS without any such restriction. I also wonder about mainframes and why IBM hasn't come out with some sort of "emulation layer" for X86 machines. Yes mainframes are expensive, but wouldn't you want to do everything you can to get mainframe software that people can learn with into as many hands as possible?

cf100clunk 4y ago
In the context of the 1980s and early 1990s, there was an x86 version of Solaris 2.x that had drivers for a few of the commonplace PC hardware devices of the time, so perhaps the home hacker might have been able to take that up, but probably only through a school licence. The ''real'' Solaris OS as well as HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, OSF/1, etc. were written and developed for the proprietary hardware platforms of Sun, HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, DEC, respectively. The cost of those hardware devices kept them out of the home hacker's reach until used or EOL units started popping up many years later.
accra4rx 4y ago
you have emulation for mainframe on x86, they give you a free 3 days emulated development env on their cloud if you sign up or else you can buy ADCD license and install it locally. other alternative is to use Hercules as emulator (only works with old ADCD images)