Among one technology researcher’s predictions for 2003 is this sobering thought: A major cyberterrorism event will disrupt the economy and bring the Internet to its knees for at least a day or two. IDC also predicts the dominance of Linux over Unix.
2003 Forecast–Linux will Eat Unix
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What’s with all these dingbat analysts and their stupid predictions?
How do you get a job making these stupid predictions anyway? Do you have to take a two week course instructed by Silvia Psychic or something? Or maybe they need two years of job experience reading tarot cards.
There are only two methods these guy can be correct:
1. By making millions of predictions. Sooner or later you’ve got to get one or two right.
2. By stating the obvious.
“I predict the sun will rise tommorrow morning”
Oh gee-wiz, you don’t say, eh?
but hasn’t UNIX pretty much always been dead (in market share and relevance) for home use besides OS X (I love my *BSD’s and no one is taking them away!). Linux tramples unix for home use in a breeze and probably for corporate desktops too, but I still think that linux feels kind of dirty to corporations for mission critical big iron stuff. That’s unix’s niche and I think it will continue to dominate there for a good while.
[insert obligatory *BSD is dying post here]
Sorry, a little /. humor to tide you over 🙂
Mmmm, Kobold, I’m not sure.
If it was something like “Our IT guy would like to install this OS on the new server, it comes on a CD and cost us nothing”, maybe I agree,
but what if a known consulting firm (someone said IBM?) comes in with big irons, tested and guaranteed, and those big irons happen to be running Linux?
IMHO, corporations won’t even blink an eye.
On the desktop, and corporate desktop in particular, I agree, it’s a different story, but it’s getting better really fast.
The other day, for example, I installed Red Hat 8 after a long time away from that distribution, and, geez, if
I was impressed!!
But I am probably digressing now…
so, good night! 🙂
They were so convincing that even SGI decided to go with NT workstations. It turned out to be a piss-poor idea, and they eventually dropped the NT workstations.
The reason why people still run UNIX on the mission critical computers is, simply, because UNIX is so good.
so what.
I think Sun’s view of Linux being good for “edge” services is pretty spot on. Linux is great for small miscelaneous jobs that require a lot of utility for a small investment but the price of the OS is a surpisingly small percentage of the cost for most servers and projects. For example, I needed a 4 CPU, 4GB RAM server with a couple hundred GB of RAID 0+1 storage. Buying a server grade PC with all of this isn’t really cheaper than what I can get a fully configured Sun 450 for and the Sun comes with Solaris. Linux simply does not have the scalibility that Solaris does and while I do have some Linux servers that have stayed up over a year I also have a few that crash for mysterious reasons (probably flakey PC hardware). Every minute this server is down is lost revenue so while I could probably make a Linux server work for this customer I could also loose a lot of money whilest scaling the learning curve. Solaris just plain works when paired with Sun hardware.
Linux is a clone of UNIX
All the Linux developers have managed to do in 10 years is copy ideas that have been done in real UNIX systems for decades.
Linux will never kill UNIX