A new study predicts that Linux will take over low-end servers and share the spotlight with .Net in high-end servers. Plus, hardware heavyweights HP, IBM and Sun–will lose out.
Linux and .Net to Trounce Unix
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Eugenia Loli
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This article is light on the substance and heavy on the wild opinionated speculation.
There are numbers that say Linux has good upward momentum in Low and Mid Range servers already, and this is expected to increase. The argument here is will it be enough to become dominant, and at a loss to who NT based .NET (referred to as NT for the remainder) or Commercial UNIXs (referred to as UNIX for the remainder) like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, etc. Linux will be a big player in low-midrange, the only question is how big of a player and how soon.
In the high end a lot hinges on the 2.6 kernel. Right now Linux does not scale to large SMPs (everything scales to clusters). Also Linux does not have all the nifty RAS (Reliability and Serviceability) features. Hot swap processors, memory, pci? Non Volitile error logging? Interaction with service processor? Hot kernel patching? Etherchanel? So any assumptions about Linux in the high end assume at least a few years guesswork about capability, let alone acceptance.
And NT in the high end. Really, that’s funny.
And hardware heavyweights will not lose out selling Linux, they will win. They make the hardware after all.
“The future is anything but bright for proprietary Unix operating systems”.
If one compares that with the following discussion on
slashdot: ‘Why The Dinosaurs Won’t Die’, the inclination
is to question the first asserttion.
These analysis reports of Linux and overtaking Unix is bizzare to me as trends seem to indicate that it is free BSD that is growing the fastest of all the unix-like OSes.
BSD marketshare is already larger than Linux’s is… and it shows no signs of declining.
freeBSD as freeBSD is not growing that quickly. However, OS X is based on freeBSD and OSX is certainly getting share. Also Microsoft uses a lot of BSD code in Windows, they just don’t give back. Linux uses a lot of BSD code, and they don’t give back. BSD code is in almost all OSs out there. So yes it is gaining share, like 100% share.
And yes, the Mainframe business won’t die. However it is slipping a bit, enough that in maybe 800 years it will have withered away. The growth is certainly gone. Some will argue Mainframe growth, but those are counting by MIPS, not by revenue.