Unix is dead. Long live Unix!:
It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat?
Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we've felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn't support AIX – already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX is the last proprietary Unix which was in active development, and constitutes four of the 10 entries in the official Open Group list.
Within Oracle, Solaris is in maintenance mode. Almost exactly six year ago, we reported that the next major release, Solaris 12, had disappeared from Oracle's roadmap. HPE's HP-UX is also in maintenance mode because there's no new hardware to run it on. Itanium really is dead now and at the end that's all HP-UX could run on. It's over a decade since we reported that HP investigated but canceled an effort to port it to x86-64.
The last incarnation of the SCO Group, Xinuos, is still around and offers not one but two proprietary UNIX variants: SCO OpenServer, descended from SCO Xenix, and UnixWare, descended from Novell's Unix. We note that OpenServer 10, a more modern OS based on FreeBSD 10, has disappeared from Xinuos's homepage. It's worth pointing out that the SCO Group was the company formerly known as Caldera, and isn't the same SCO as the Santa Cruz Operation which co-created Xenix with Microsoft in the 1980s.
There used to be two Chinese Linux distros which had passed the Open Group's testing and could use the Unix trademark: Inspur K/UX and Huawei EulerOS. Both companies have let the rather expensive trademark lapse, though. But the important detail here is that Linux passed and was certified as a UNIX™. And it wasn't just one distro, although both were CentOS Linux derivatives. We suspect that any Linux would breeze through because several many un-Unix-like OSes have passed before.
[...] Ever since Windows NT in 1993, Windows has had a POSIX environment. Now, with WSL, it arguably has two of them, and we suspect that if Microsoft were so inclined, it could have Windows certified as an official Unix-compatible OS.
[...] But this illustrates the difficulty of definining precisely what the word "Unix" means in the 21st century. It hasn't meant "based on AT&T code" since Novell bought Unix System Labs from AT&T in 1993, kept the code, and donated the trademark to the Open Group. Since that time, if it passes the Open Group's testing (and you pay a fee to use the trademark), it's UNIX™. Haiku hasn't so it isn't. Linux has so it is. But then so is z/OS, which is a direct descendant of OS/390, or IBM MVS as it was called when it was launched in 1974. In other words, an OS which isn't actually based on, similar to, or even related to Unix.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2023, @11:27PM
It's all just a matter of time now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2023, @11:30PM (2 children)
That saying works for the "good guys" too
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:20AM
??? Please explain your reasoning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:18PM
Who exactly is doing the embracing, extending, and extinguishing here, and to whom? I can't even figure out who the "good" and "bad" guys are that you are talking about.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tizan on Wednesday January 18 2023, @11:32PM (1 child)
SCO of yore sued IBM (with the help of Microsoft, the whole saga is on groklaw), autozone, Novell etc...for basically using the UNIX api in Linux i thought. because they thought they had bought the copyright of the original AT&T Unix.
In the meantime has not google won their case against Oracle basically by saying that api is not patentable ?
So the new SCO (XINUos) is suing IBM again according the link in the summary again !
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:42AM
What's even funnier is that IBM paid the new SCO millions of dollars to settle all claims, both historic and future, in exchange for agreeing to fuck off and die.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday January 18 2023, @11:37PM (3 children)
There's Linux, and various BSDs ... what are the various current UNIX-alike flavors in wide use? I guess many of them are really more distinguished by their package management systems than anything else.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 19 2023, @02:53AM (2 children)
Since when has AIX been Unix? It's a somewhat Unix-compatible OS, but then so was the Windows Posix subsystem.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday January 19 2023, @08:57AM (1 child)
I thought AIX was System V R3 or maybe R4? Linux was better which is why they sidelined it. They had a case of sour grapes regarding Solaris, before Linux really took off. The Solaris kernel did some things very well, way ahead of Linux, and it was a shame it was taken back under a closed source license. Anyway, that's ancient history now. The PHBs killed Unix.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Thursday January 19 2023, @09:30AM
Can't remember who said this but AIX came about when one alien race described SysV to another alien race but their universal translators were broken and they had to gesture a lot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:24AM (1 child)
It was my first Unix, sometimes around 1992. With X and a powerful network cluster in the lab, it was quite far ahead of anything available at home. I took a class where we learned about silicon processing, and we ran simulations of crystal growth that used a finite element mesh [wikipedia.org]. It made me feel like a real engineer. It seemed like Unix desktops stood still for a long time though, while everybody else caught up and surpassed.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 19 2023, @02:24AM
We didn't get Solaris, we got Apollo workstations - with a token ring network that ran over co-ax cable... Good machines, for the day.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:38AM
The unix family tree is more twisted, recursive and loopy than a west virginia hillbilly. And that's the hillbilly that's his own grandpa.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Thursday January 19 2023, @01:02AM
Would be funny if the linux foundation picks up the trademark. Like, they could even throw it in as a gold member perk to have uname return Unix™️ or whatnot just for laughs... :D
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 19 2023, @02:19AM (5 children)
Back in the 1980s we had Apollo workstations (with HUMONGOUS 19" color monitors) they ran their own twisted version of Solaris OS, not Solaris at all, but basically Solaris with most of the commands renamed... So, there had to be Solaris OS back then, and we're on 11 now? Well, I guess Windows is on 11 - but how do you count the Windows versions, really?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2023, @09:40AM
Well, it was SunOS then, based on BSD. When Sun changed to SysV they changed the name to Solaris. That was in the early nineties. (Though internally you could still find the SunOS-name and identifiers internally).
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Thursday January 19 2023, @05:45PM (1 child)
Apollo ran Domain/OS, not Solaris or SunOS. It was a unix-alike. I think you could switch environments between domain and unix. Much like some unixes had bsd and sysv/att environments
HP bought them, stuck their name on their PA-RISC systems running HP-UX and that was pretty much the end of Domain/OS. I've heard that ClearCase came out of Apollo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 19 2023, @06:36PM
We only had them to run the digital logic simulation software - Mentor Graphics, IIRC - and the Apollo workstations all had serial numbers built into the motherboard circuitry so they could lock down the software per machine. They would fail to deliver license updates periodically, so we would regularly set the system clocks back to work around that oversight. I did some simple graphics programming on them, they were pretty good as compared to the PCs of the day, definitely bigger screens with higher resolution. As for the OS, I just remember it was different - like deliberately and pointlessly different, might have been called Domain/OS - whatever it was it rapidly faded from my mind when I graduated in 1990.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday January 20 2023, @03:15AM (1 child)
I'm way ahead of you guys on that metric.
I have a Windows box running the latest version of Win95. OSR2, no less!
( It runs my Picoscope digital sampling oscilloscope.
Its worked faultlessly for over 20 years. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 20 2023, @01:50PM
You're obviously anti-social. Real participants in the collective replace their equipment on a regular 24 month schedule to keep the wheels of the economy spinning smoothly. People like you are why we have forced updates now. ;-)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Thursday January 19 2023, @12:34PM (1 child)
In 1995 a well-meaning PHB sent me to some Oracle sales training with a very good buffet. The guy stood up and told us Unix was dead. It was going to be Windows NT from then on.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Friday January 20 2023, @03:31AM
Generally, I have found the PHB/MBA to be well meaning, but terribly misinformed, as they listen to the siren songs of quick money and wealth, but are woefully ignorant of the physics we all have to adhere to.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Thursday January 19 2023, @02:22PM (2 children)
Only if you conveniently ignore the first two entries on The very list TFA links to [opengroup.org].
MacOS is Unix and MacOS is under active development. You don't have to like Apple, you don't have to like the current definition of what "Unix" means, you may want it to mean a descendent of System V, but them's the breaks.
...and fire up the terminal in MacOS and it sure looks and feels like Unix, with most of the BSD userland stuff already there and pretty much everything else (including an X11 implementation) available via one of several package managers. You can even format the files systems as case sensitive if you like...
There's no difficulty since - unlike many computing terms - it's actually legally defined, and the list cited in TFA is based on that definition... It's a lot clearer now than it has been in the past...
As the last paragraph notes, the only reason that Linux isn't Unix is because... well, pedantically it is because Linux is a kernel, not an OS but even if something called "Linux" could get Unix certification it couldn't be shared under the GPL - and previous efforts in the past have shown that there's nothing much to be gained by individual distros getting certified.
I think that what this article is really saying is that the Open Group is (or should be) dead because the top "Unix-like" OSs (including those using the Linux kernel) now have sufficient kudos to stand on their own without validation (I'm not even sure why Apple keep it up since they walked away from the server market where the U-word might have opened some doors, but they do).
Overall, pretty much every significant operating system - across desktop, laptop and mobile - is now either a "Unix-like" system under the hood (MacOS, GNU/Linux distros, iOS, Android, ChromeOS) or Windows, and if you include "mobile" in the mix, the Unix-likes together have the greatest market share.
(Score: 1) by kai_h on Thursday January 19 2023, @09:16PM
^ This.
macOS is by definition Unix and it is under active development.
Apple, like them or hate them, are the largest vendor of Unix workstations on the planet. I don't know why Apple continues to maintain Unix certification on macOS, it's likely due to some big contracts they have with customers or the ability to bid on large contracts or something like that, but whatever it is - macOS is unarguably Unix.
Every single Mac shipping today arrives out of the box with Unix installed on it.
Heck, even iOS, tvOS and watchOS are based on the core of macOS and are almost Unix in their own right.
Yes, that's correct, I have a wristwatch that runs Unix ^_^
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday January 20 2023, @09:43PM
There might still be some contracts with government agencies, defence organisations, medical businesses and their suppliers where certification is important and required to do business. It's an important niche.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].