It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos released Update Pack 1 and Maintenance Pack 1 for UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018, followed by similar update packs for OpenServer 6 later in 2024.
These update packs bring a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as a slew of updated open source components, like new versions of SAMBA, sendmail, GCC and tons of other GNU components, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and so, so much more, enabling a relatively modern and up-to-date build and porting environment. They can be installed through the patchck update utility, and while the Maintenance Pack is free for existing registered users, the Update Pack requires a separate license. UnixWare, while fully capable as a classic UNIX for workstations, isn’t really aimed at individuals or hobbyists (sadly), and instead focuses on existing enterprise deployments, where such licensing costs are par for the course.
UnixWare runs on x86, and can be installed both on real hardware as well as in various virtualised environments. I contacted Xinuos a few days ago for a review license, and they supplied me with one so I can experiment with and write about UnixWare. I’ve currently got it installed in a Linux kvm, where it runs quite well, including the full X11R6 CDE desktop environment and graphical administration tools. Installing updates is a breeze thanks to patchck automating the process of finding, downloading, and installing the correct ones. I intend to ask Xinuos about an optimal configuration for running UnixWare on real hardware, too.
I wonder how many users it has compared to Solaris or AIX. Also, is there an end of support date announced yet?
Solaris is definitely king there. We get more interest in pkgsrc on UnixWare than pkgsrc on AIX in the 2020s, but that might be because AIX is (a) better supported by IBM who make sure popular server software is easy to compile (b) weirder and harder to support in the first place (UnixWare uses a fairly run of the mill GNU+SysV toolchain, AIX doesn’t).
Solaris is no doubt the most popular and, certainly on the Illumos/SmartOS side, it probably has a community more likely to reach out to something like pkgsrc. What you say about AIX rings true. IBM is probably providing a deeper bench of support and the kind of customer that is choosing AIX no doubt prefers to get as much as they can through IBM.
Pkgsrc is a cool resource. I was playing with OASIS Linux the other day and was going to use pkgsrc with it but I ran into build errors that I did not have time to work through at the time (probably on the OASIS side). I have been into Chimera Linux recently and its cports system feels like it was inspired by pkgsrc. It had me wondering if cports could be adapted to be a similarly cross-platform system.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle Solaris had more users than the other commercial Unixes even if you counted 10 and 11 separately.
Re “UnixWare uses a fairly run of the mill GNU+SysV toolchain”: I remember compiling PHP 4 on OpenServer, circa year 2000. It took me the best part of a week just to hammer automake, autoconf, and all the dependencies into a working state – and the resulting binary still experienced the odd segfault now and then.
Moving to RHEL and having the compilation work on the first attempt was so liberating!
I know that OpenServer is not unixWare – but still sincerely hope that the whole gnu/oss ecosystem is better supported now that it was back then 😀
I have no industry knowledge of UnixWare but I did get swept into a bit of a rabbit hole after the hierloom post recently and came across a few decent sized UnixWare installs still out there. One of them was over 400 systems if I recall.
Probably a couple dozen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI
Back in 2021, Xinuos decided to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, the “much-hated SCO,.” and filed a lawsuit against IBM and Red Hat accusing them of violating both copyright and antitrust law. Which copyrights? Well, Monterey! The exact same copyrights that were at issue in SCO v. IBM in 2003. The antitrust part of the lawsuit has to do with a failed attempt at creating a new OS based on FreeBSD. Don’t ask me to explain – I can’t.
Somehow UnixWare manages to instill in it owners a desire to engage in insanely stupid litigation.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65760456/xinuos-inc-v-international-business-machines-corporation/
BTW anyone knows why this story has magically disappeared from the front page?
https://www.osnews.com/story/141675/the-dumb-reason-why-flag-emojis-arent-working-on-your-site-in-chrome-on-windows/
The text is there, but the header is missing. This is happening to a few stories on the front page, where the text of the story is is displayed but the headline, submitter, date, etc are all missing. Instead, there are just a large set of left double quotation marks.
It looks like its happening to stories that start with a quote, rather than regular story text,
Drumhellar,
That’s so weird. At first I wondered if it’s a CSS issue. But the server failed to output the article section altogether so there must be an issue on the PHP side of things.
Given that the article is actually about emojis, it stands to reason that Thom tried placing a flag emoji in the title? Maybe a PHP function is returning undefined somewhere because of the UTF8 sequence became unreadable after the database botched the character in the wrong UTF8 storage type. I wonder if there’s an ASCII zero involved as that could cause some functions to stop processing strings; many libraries written in C treat ASCII zero as end of string.
Thom, if I’m right about these events, you may be able to edit the article to remove possible invalid characters and fix the rendering.
I say let Xinuos die, and as soon as possible. They made big noise about how they weren’t to blame for the infamous SCO vs IBM, AIX/Linux lawsuits, then turned around and sued IBM/RedHat themselves… They immediately took their OS’ to a subscription-only model, running only on ESX (for those with an older perpetual license, it’s not difficult to get it converted to run on ESXi without a subscription). No more hardware support, or really anything new. They doubled-down on supporting legacy customers and gave up on any efforts to upgrade. OpenServer 10 disappeared back into the abyss. Will OpenServer and UnixWare stop working when the Y2038 bug rolls around? Probably so.
v2.95.3 is the newest version of GCC you’ll find available for either OpenServer or UnixWare. And it’s the same story for any other open-source projects. The rest of the world dropped support for their platforms when the IBM lawsuit started in the 2000s as well, and the gcc toolchain issue really made things impossible for anybody else that might have wanted to buck that trend.
Xenix was historically notable. Their OS’ were decent quality in the 90s, but started looking decrepit in the early 2000s, and ancient in the coming years. USB support for example, was terribly buggy and mostly unusable. Disk I/O performance was poor with UnixWare and just awful with OpenServer, unable to take advantage of 1/10th the performance of SSDs for instance. Today they’re just relics, bit-rotting away, and the world will be a better place when we’re rid of them, and their parent company in particular…
> v2.95.3 is the newest version of GCC you’ll find available for either OpenServer or UnixWare.
They’re shipping GCC 7.whatever now. I’ve got it installed right here.
GCC 7 seems much more reasonable. It is at least 5 years old but supports C11 and C++17 at least. In theory, it would compile GCC 14 for example. I am not sure if that is possible on UnixWare but I do not see why not (it would be interesting to try).
Due to stricter warnings-as-errors, and the fact that there’s so little portable Unix software written in C++20 in the first place (especially emitting desktop applications), GCC 14 is probably less useful on UnixWare than GCC 7.
Ignoring the litigation, it looks like the typical vendor of proprietary Unix (for the nitpickers: vendor of proprietary Unix that isn’t Apple): milking their remaining customers as much as they can for as long as they can, HP’s HP-UX division and Oracle’s Solaris division are similar.