Unix. IT should ask for it by name

http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2009/03/unix_it_should.html

by ccraigIW • 17 years ago

18 16 17 years ago

weblog.infoworld.com

jcapote• 17 years ago

Yea, so the open/unix way is better than windows. I thought we figured this out about a decade ago? How is this news exactly?

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

Did you read the article? It's about the UNIX trademark.

pert3• 17 years ago

I hadn't read that OS X had become 'real UNIX' (trying to do a 'The Wire' reference there). That's a very smart move by Apple, as it will help them to attract OS X ports of traditional UNIX software, such as the big databases, and will certainly help establish them on the server market.

ams6110• 17 years ago

Oracle 10g (10.1) was available for Mac OS X but they've not kept up and no 11g at all. I think they just found that the number of sales for that platform was too small.

SwellJoe3• 17 years ago

We tinkered with providing complete support for Mac OS X in our products (our products work on Mac OS X, and just about any other UNIX, but it's not necessarily easy to install and configure currently)...and found the number of people using it on web servers is vanishingly small. The cost of hardware is just dramatically higher for most users (an XServe may be nearly cost-competitive with equivalent Sun hardware, but compared to low end white-box or Dell hardware used by most hosting providers for most customers, it's just insanely expensive). It just wouldn't be possible to run a profitable web hosting venture on Apple hardware.

I think we have two customers using Mac OS X. To put that in perspective, we have over 1500 customers using CentOS or RHEL, and a few hundred using Debian or Ubuntu, and a couple dozen using FreeBSD and Solaris. Admittedly, all of those systems have full support, but FreeBSD and Solaris had a lot more users than Mac OS X even before we were supporting it properly.

interknot2• 17 years ago

I'm somewhat disappointed that the author doesn't recall Microsoft's XENIX:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2062

SwellJoe3• 17 years ago

Why? It's been dead for 20 years.

interknot2• 17 years ago

The author wrote that he's been writing about Unix for decades and mentions that Microsoft could "attain" the UNIX trademark; I merely thought XENIX would be worth a note in that context.

forkqueue• 17 years ago

Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should have retired at least a decade ago.

Similarly, anyone naive enough to believe that "Any skills, staff, source code, infrastructure, and solutions you invest in any Unix are portable across IBM, Sun, Fujitsu, HP, Apple, and generic 32- and 64-bit x86 hardware." really shouldn't be placed in a position where they have any say over platform choice.

cabalamat• 17 years ago

> Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should have retired at least a decade ago.

Me too. I did wonder if this was written in the 1990s, but it was actually written this year. It's silly and clueless.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I think the audience for the article is pointy haired managers.

And the language they understand sound exactly like the language we understand but is in fact not the same thing at all!

mrbuwch• 17 years ago

Funny, because my job at one point involved porting a piece of (C++) software from Solaris and it was actually rather more difficult than you'd think from reading this article. Why? Because the two OSs were rather different. Threading and networking were particularly troublesome and the UNIX trademark didn't help me. Methinks this guy is making things seem rather more easy than they really are.

Unix. IT should ask for it by name

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