Linux and Microsoft’s .NET will dislodge Unix as the dominant OS within the next 10 years, according to a study. Senior research analyst and report author Mike Davis, from UK-based Butler Group, said the shift had started with smaller businesses moving to install Linux for file and print services, replacing Windows NT and lower-end Unix.
Unix to be Pushed Out
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Haa.. I would say this man has guts. Predicting what the computer world would be like 10 solid years hence is quite a task. But maybe he is right: people are still inventing new TV brands, cell phones, jeans, chocolates and all. But thanks to Bill Gates and company, the commercial OS market is now closed. Inventing a new brand is almost illegal, and things can only get worse.
Actually, I would say it’s the opposite. Guts would be making an outside-the-box prediction for something to happen within the next 12-18 months.
I predict the Kansas City Royals will win the World Series in 2011.
Things is, 10 years hence, nobody is gonna know or care what some journalist predicted 10 years ago.
Yeah right.
Windows is a terrible OS with a great marketing department and support.
Linux is a copy of Minux (hope I spelled that correctly) which is a copy of UNIX.
OS X is based on FreeBSD…you get the point.
Nothing is going to replace Unix (and unix clones) until someone comes up with a new OS from the ground up and designs it to do exactly what it should (by that I mean, not everything to everybody).
When Unix is replaced by linux, the Jets will win the Superbowl.
About 5 or may be 7 years ago I read a feature story in Byte Magazine proclaiming death to Unix and reign of power to Windows NT in just a few years. I looks like those predictions weren’t worth a damn and so won’t these. In fact Unix now is stronger than ever before spanning from low end workstations to super-servers encroaching on mainframes. Linux will most likely support Unix well into the future.
“Minux (hope I spelled that correctly)
The correct spelling is minix
“[/i]” Nothing is going to replace Unix (and unix clones) until someone comes up with a new OS from the ground up and designs it to do exactly what it should (by that I mean, not everything to everybody).”[/i]
That’s what Be did, and it unfortunately was dominated (be it illegally in the gratest instance) by OSes that had a more mature code base.
It would seem that to build upon an already-existant, mature code base is the more ideal method to create an advanced operating system.
While it is true that Unix will almost certinly be replaced… it will be replaced by “Unix-like” operating systems (Unix whcih are not deemed to be of official Unix origin as stated by the open group).
Linux and OS X being the most likely…
I think it is a little misleading to draw a line between UNIX and LINUX. Though LINUX is not “officially” UNIX, it is disingenuous not to recognize it as a branch of UNIX.
I think the journalist has head up his b**t. Right now, the world is UNIX (LINUX, BSD, OS X, HP-UX, AIX, etc) and “legacy”
(win2000, XP). Oh yea, there are few people who use Amiga and Be. In the future it will be ALL UNIX. I think people will ultimately get fed up with the cost and fragility of Windows.
The real question: LINUX or OS X. I vote for the latter, because it will get much better developer support, and already has better ease-of-use. LINUX scores on cost and speed right now, but I think the latter advantage is transitory, and the cost issue will be trumped by the fact that it will take about 10 years JUST for penguin-heads to pick a distro for the general non-geek public! sheesh!
10 years from now I’ll still be able run bash, emacs, awk, grep, sed, vi, tail, head, echo, [, etc on a kernel and filesystem the has /etc /usr /dev /bin.
I’ll still be able to compile code from the 80’s to get basic system services like inetd, cron, ftp, etc.
I’ll be able to NFS mount drives to my system, configure the thing using some files underneath /etc, put my changes in ~/.whatever, and still communicate with the Ubernet, play my MP8’s, watch streaming MPEG6’s and play NetHack.
I’ll be able to write in Java, Common Lisp, Python, Perl, C, C++ and TCL. We’ll STILL be running an X11 desktop 🙂
So, now, why is this prediction important again?
>> In the future it will be ALL UNIX. I think people will ultimately get fed up with the cost and fragility of Windows
>>
In terms of Market share though, Unix is dwindling, while Windows is growing.
As for cost, Microsoft can close shop today, not make a single dime, and still be able to pay all their employees/remain profitable for the next five years!! Go figure.
Fragility? Windows is no longer fragile. Microsoft is good with marketing, and it is true that they have sold a lot of bullshit using hypermarketing tactics. More importantly however, they are committed to improvement. They are always making their products better. So, in the long run, they not only out-market opponents, they also end up having the better product.
The worse news? Microsoft has become politically powerful as well. Bush got more money from MS than he did from Enron (about three times more, actually). They funded Ashcroft’s failed senate race, and as you can see, they have the entire goverment and justice department inside their bag.
So, no, Unix will, if anything, be replaced by a mature windows. Personally, I can only hope that OSS people will somehow keep hope alive.
All the political stuff about Bush and Ashcroft reminds me of companies like IBM, and AT&T before that.
Yes, U.S. politics are important to Microsoft, and the U.S. is a pretty influential body.
But then, so was Great Brittain about 100 years ago.
Frankly, I have no idea what the computer world will be like 10 years from now. I didn’t know 10 years ago, either.
Linux will be dead in the water unless it gets decent 3rd party hardware support. The day i can walk into any computer store and pick a piece of hardware off the shelf at random and find it has drivers for Linux-thats the day when Linux is ready for the desktop.
No one can predict what will happen in 10 years in the computer world.
I read an old article explaining that in the 90s, every house will have some sort of virtual dimension that you can touch and see. Did that happen? Nope
That’s what I want to know. If I have to do anything at the command line or wait for any user action to slowly update (or not update at all) on computers of the year 2012, then I am reaaaalllly going to be irritable. If the underlying OS architecture is Unix-based or not, I do not care. I just want something that works and is reasonable.
It amazes me that the most conservative of the two major parties and closest to my own beliefs (Republican)does not want to prosecute microsoft. They have killed more small businesses and stifled more innovation in the computer industry than any other company. They have been the most unethical coroporation of the modern age, building their success not on better products and better price/feature/quality ratio, but by back room deals, conspiracy, and strong-arm tactics.
Think of it this way:
Liberals/Democrats- wanting to take care of everybody (plug and pray, wizards, general brainlessness of windows and MacOS) and have their hands in everybody’s pockets for taxes and want to use technology to control the public(plug and pray, hardware detection…).
Conservatives/Republicans/Libertarians- They believe people can and should take care of themselves. So, OS/2, DOS+Win3.1, and Linux are the most conservative OSes.
Any Republican not prosecuting microsoft is just ignorant of the idelological issues involved
Besides, companies should be left alone by the government, so financial support is just protection money to make the feds leave them alone. And, that finacial support goes from one party to the next, depending on which looks like it will grab power. Anyway, for the exception to the above rule, microsoft did break the law, so the government SHOULD procecute.
One final note: Windows is and has always been fragile. It started getting really bad in the 9.x series. And anything good about nt/2000/xp is due to their OS/2 heritage and IBM.
The crap is pretty much all due to ms.
>>>>Politics…
By Mopar
that’s an interesting view…one that i’ve examined myself.
too bad it’s far more complicated. i personally DON’T know a single liberal or conservative.
those labels are an attempt to simplify things and paint things black and white.
the broad spectrum of people i know might call themselves liberal, but then talk about old fashion values, and conservatives who complain that their insurance company dropped them…and that they are “owed” something.
it’s just all BS.
a game we play to pass the time.
While I might be a very American centric person, I see the US’s dominance in software dwindling. Whatever happens here, I don’t see Germany, Peru, Spain and other countries going back to using Microsoft so soon. They are all moving to linux, slowly but surely. They will stop pumping billions of dollars into our economy to buy software over the next couple years. They will probably continue to develop and use Linux. Even if its just for the national security issue alone.
I won’t predict anything about Unix’s existance other than BSD’s, Linux and OS X will be around for a few more years.
Of course. I always say that if something can be said, there are many more sides of it or ways of looking at it. Ppl can be socially conservative and fiscally liberal. Same to computing. Like me, who has run into so many problems trying to compile stuff(I am not a programmer)that I do not even try to anymore,(give me staticly compiled exe’s or rpms) but I don’t mind playing with config files and irqs and i/o ports.
Anyway, there are such things as liberal and conservative. It’s just figuring out what things are, and what are not, and knowing that they can be mixed into one object/thing/whatever. If you don’t beleive in anything, you will fall for anything.
People can make all the predictions they want. To attempt to predict the direction of the computer industry 10 years from now, IMO, is impossible. Nobody thought PCS would be in every household and some thought *cough* 640k ought to be enough and those predictions were thought to be accurate.
I think the market forcasters considered UNIX to be sold only prepackaged systems (computer + OS) from Sun and SGI but nothing prevents an someone from installing BSD on systems. It doesn’t mean Unix will die off, if anything I see it becoming stronger. I don’t see many industries trusting anything with .Net architecture and anything with Windows/NT requires running a GUI which makes the system less stable and takes away CPU and memory which could used otherwise.
This makes Unix and Linux more appealing; in fact, I think it will make Unix stronger.
…if thing continue to progress as they have in the past 5 years! I think the PC OS market will be more open in the future. Other players can step in to compete with Windows and Linux.
Linux will be the most popular Unix. It will render other PC Unix versions irrelevant. (Apple OS X, BSD, SCO etc…) As the Linux GUI improves, OS X, BSD, SCO are dead, not because they are bad but because they are just either more costly or less popular versions of Unix. Businesses will not be interested in other versions of PC class Unix.
Windows is not going anywhere any time soon. Proprietary OSes like Windows and other new comers have a better chance of surviving simply because they are not “PC Unix”.
Time will tell.
ciao
yc
Someone get RedHat SUS certified, so we can see the rise of UNIX(tm) again.
Linux will never push out legacy systems based on (System V, BSD).
All will survive and share market because people need them
all to get work done well <period>.
HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, AIX, Linux, all BSD’s are not going to phase out over the years, only Tru64 will because it’s
Advfs and Clustering abilities will be integrated into HP-UX, this is the only phase out of an single legacy UNIX system in next 12 years.
We have legacy applications and hardware where it runs,
hardware will change, OS will not. I hope that IA64 arch will succeed and taht Itanium will run all OSes in the near
future including Guardian OS – Tandem Non Stop, Open VMS, Linux, etc.
Future is written by people who uses IT solutions everyday not by IBM, SGI, DEC, HP, SUN. Every platform vendor will do what people will want to use and/or what they are used to. And every UNIX administrator is legacy admin and will not leave it safe, stable, secure and robust UNIX system.
And for all kiddies what Unix98, Unix95 and Unix93 standard is:
http://www.opengroup.org/products/cert/certprods.htm
I don’t think any predictions are acurate.
In 1993 someone told me in “2000” we would have rocket powered roller blades (How on earth did they think this up???) and flying cars would be common place. Any predictions can be over optimistic.
Some guy at IBM once said there was room for 5 computers in the world, a little bit pessimistic.
Bascically, don’t take predictions seriously. The only thing I’ve seen them be useful for is giving developers an idea in where to head, and possibly inspiring them. This guys prediction could come true, but there is absolutely no way of knowing, so dont take it seriously.
Alot of points made here today mostly by a bunch of *nix heads. Don’t get me wrong, I’m running Linux servers and Windows/Mac desktops. But I have sincere doubts that Linux (as it stands today) will be recognizable 10 years from now. Hopefully, there will be a superior micro-kernel architecture with no device drivers compiled inline, with real-time processing support, and the ability to scale beyond 8 processors. Today’s Linux is nice for scaling out into large clusters or grids, but it can’t cut it as a data warehouse or OLTP for VLDB applications.
For those of you dopes who are still knocking Windows – here are some facts for you to chew on: 1) Windows 2000/XP have inherited no low-level technologies from OS/2 or Windows 3.1 – in fact, this so called legacy of 32-bit Windows OSs has much more architecturally in common with the System V variants of commercial UNIX, 2) unlike the UNIX platforms, it strives for integration and consolidation of redundant efforts every few years – the Linux/UNIX world has hundreds of APIs across thousands of products – 3rd party developers really hate this, 3) the so-called fragility to which you’ve referred is the largely the result of untrained consumer users and ignorant sysadmins who know nothing about maintaining their systems [and don’t even try to sell me the *nix stability story as a counterpoint to being a tart of a user] – I’ve run Windows servers since Nt 3.1 and have maintained 99% uptime on them – the same is true of my Linux (RH5) and Solaris (still 2.6) servers.
Windows will continue to maintain user/developer mindshare until the *nix folks rally around several simple ideas 1) usability, usability, usability, (help me Jobs-Aqua-nobi, you’re my only hope!) – see http://www.useit.com, 2) a unified object-oriented system API (uhm..not Java – that’s a language) with multiple programming language support, 3) a driver architecture that is part of aforementioned unified API, 4) a ubiquitous P2P/grid architecture/infrastructure that supplants as much of the datacenter as possible, 5) oh yeah…usability, 6) desktop ISV support [Intuit, Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, etc.]
Yep. There was this very famous (in croatia) computer journalist who predicted with high selfconfidence, that Windows NT 4.0 marks the end of Unix “no matter what you unix people say”. Ummm.. actually, Mastruko (the name of this journalist) was a bit more rude than this, but nevermind.
Anyway, I wish I could rub that article under his nose and ask how exactly did Unix disappear.
First of all, please read what i have said in previous post, i haven’t predict anything, i just have read road maps from vendors and most of them have to support customers on their native platform because of contracts they have.
Customers won’t migrate to Linux until there will be hardware comparable to legacy platforms, migration tools for given OS and of course support from aplication developers.
I would like to hear your opinions about HW-OS-API migration?
>>Linux will never push out legacy systems based on
>>(System V, BSD). All will survive and share market
>>because people need them all to get work done well
>><period>.
I agree that they will probably all stay but some will have minimal success. Linux will have the lion share of the PC Unix systems. Big servers like Sun, HP, IBM even SGI all have their user bases that will continue to use them because of specific applications that they need. Note also that all these systems are on different platforms.
The PC platforms or PC Class servers are different. This is where Linux will have the most success at the expense of BSD, SCO, OS X/XServe etc… because of price/performance, applications, popularity, OpenSource etc… Any company that sells PC class unix boxes would be wise to distribute and support Linux as well because their customers will want it.
ciao
yc
Ok. It’s like this…
In 10 years, Linux will likely be still sniffing Windows’ *ss. And Microsoft’s .NET will still be sniffing UNIX’s *ss. BUT, UNIX is not sniffing anybody’s *ss ever since. So leave it out of the competetion. People try to match UNIX with other OS’s but UNIX seems to never stoop down on them. Let Linux and Windows beat each other up with crap. UNIX is just always there in the corner…smiling.
Linux belongs to “unices” as well as Macosx.
Always the same blabla from windoz!