Sales of commercial Unix are falling, as if from a cliff. There must be something behind this dramatic recession. Did Linux kill its ancestor, becoming an excellent substitute for it, as if it had realized the " Body-Stealing Invasion " in the world of operating systems?
Unix Start
The first release of Unix took place 50 years ago, in 1969, in Bell's labs , an AT&T research and development company. Happy Birthday, Unix. True, at that time it was also called Unics, from the UNIplexed Information and Computing Service. No one can remember when cs was reduced to x. They wrote it on a DEC PDP / 7 computer in a DEC assembler.
In laboratories, there was a need for a printed set of patent applications. The Unix development team took this as an opportunity to take on a new powerful DEC PDP / 11/20 computer, so they quickly drew up a typing program that issued patent applications. After that, the popularity of Unix was constantly growing in the company.
In 1973, the 4th version of Unix was released, rewritten in C. The introduction to the instructions that came with the system said: “The number of installed Unix copies has exceeded 20, and this number is expected to increase further” (K. Thompson and DM Richie, The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 4th ed. November 1973).
They had no idea! In 1973, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, two key Unix architects, presented scientific work at a Unix conference. They immediately received requests for copies of this OS.
Due to an agreement between AT&T and the US government in 1956, AT&T was not supposed to do “nothing more than provide communications services.” As a result, they could provide a license for products coming from Bell's laboratories, but they could not actively turn it into a commercial product. Therefore, Unix was distributed in source with a license, at a cost that covered the cost of shipping, packaging and “reasonable royalties”.
Since AT&T could not work with Unix as a commercial product, the OS did not receive any advertising. She did not have support and bug fixes on request. But, despite this, Unix went to universities, found application in the military, and eventually penetrated the commercial world.
Since Unix was rewritten in C, it was relatively easy to port to new computer architectures, and soon Unix already worked on a variety of pieces of iron. He broke out of the DEC product line and now could run almost everywhere.
The advent of commercial Unix OS
In 1982, as part of the next agreement, AT&T had to abandon the management of Bell laboratories, and they were divided into small regional companies. This freed AT&T from some previous limitations. Now the company could formally commercialize Unix. In 1983, license prices were raised, and finally support and service appeared.
It was this commercialization that prompted Richard Stallman to create the GNU Project, in an effort to write a Unix version free of AT&T source code. Happy Birthday, GNU Project, You are 36 years old this year.
Of course, those who already had Unix source code under previous licenses could continue to own this version. They changed, expanded and corrected it independently, or with the help of the Unix user community, which emerged as self-help groups in the absence of support from AT&T.
IBM, HP, Sun, Silicon Graphics, and many other hardware vendors had their own proprietary, commercial versions of Unix or similar operating systems.
Unix was gradually becoming a system that was called upon to withstand high loads in markets such as healthcare or banking. Unix turned out to be installed on powerful mainframes and minicomputers in areas such as aviation, space, automotive and shipyards, and universities around the world took it into service.
The number of installed Unix copies increased dramatically when it was transferred to personal computers, and especially after the release of more powerful Intel 80386 processors in 1985. Now Unix could be installed on mainframes, minicomputers, and personal computers - if you paid for it.
Unix Wars
The late 80s and early 90s were marked by a long and dirty struggle for domination and standardization between different versions of Unix. Obviously, each interested party wanted its version to be considered the gold standard. As a result, the standards themselves appeared, trying to solve compatibility problems.
This led to the emergence of a single UNIX specification (which includes the POSIX standard). The word UNIX in capital letters is now a trademark of the Open Group. It is reserved for systems that obey the Single UNIX Specification. So now UNIX is a trademark, and Unix stands for the OS family, some of which call themselves UNIX.
This is a very brief summary of the period, which probably seemed more confusing to potential Unix buyers of the time than to us today looking back. Of course, if customers did not know what to buy, they put off the purchase to see how events would develop. Sales slowed significantly.
It was a wound caused by Unix to itself, but it was not yet fatal.
Happy birthday linux
In August 2019, Linux turned 28 years old. Happy Birthday, Linux. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, made his famous announcement that he was working on his own OS kernel as a hobby. His motivation was the desire to better study the architecture of the 386 processor.
In the project of Richard Stallman, the GNU Project already created many elements for a Unix-like OS, with the exception of the core system; GNU Hurd was not ready for release (and still not ready). Linux Linus Torvalds closed this gap.
Based on the Linux kernel and GNU tools, a fully working Unix-like OS was born. Fans of precision will call it GNU / Linux, and everyone else will use the short notation, Linux. And while both camps show respect and appreciation for contributions to this project from both sides, everything suits us.
Since 1991, Linux has constantly increased its capabilities, completeness and improved stability. Today it is used in a tremendously large number of cases and products.
The earliest supported distribution is Slackware. He was released in 1993. It is based on the previous distribution, Softlanding Linux System, released a year before. Slackware tries to be as similar to Unix among all Linux distributions. It is nice to see that the project lives on, has a large community and devoted team members.
Linux climbing
The appeal of a free Unix-like OS, along with access to the source code, proved to be a convincing bait. Linux is now everywhere.
- It runs the web. W3Techs reports that Linux is used by 70% of the 10 million most popular sites on the Alexa list.
- It has public clouds. Amazon EC2 Linux runs on 92% of the servers, with 350,000 instances.
- It employs the fastest supercomputers in the world. Linux is installed on all the 500 fastest supercomputers.
- He went into space. Falcon 9 rocket flight computers are running Linux.
- He is in your pocket. At the core of Google Android is the Linux kernel. There are 2.5 billion active Android devices in the world. These are smartphones, chromebooks and other devices. And Apple’s iOS is based on code directly derived from the Unix variant developed at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). So, regardless of your preferences in smartphones, their work is based on elements from Unix-like operating systems.
- He works in your smart home. Your home’s smart gadget will almost certainly run on embedded Linux.
- He manages the telephone. Do you have a VOIP phone on your desk, or is there a switch in the server room? Most likely, they are running Linux.
- It is inside your computer. Even if you are not using Linux, Microsoft has included the Linux kernel in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.0 for Windows 10.
- He is inside the car. Tesla and other automakers use Linux in their machines.
Linux dominates everywhere except desktops. And even Microsoft is taking steps toward the Linux world from its desktop fortress, as part of Windows Subsystem for Linux.
However, our conversation concerns the struggle between Unix and Linux, not Linux and Windows. The bottom line is that wherever Unix used to be, Linux is now. And Linux is in places where Unix has never been. Like smart TVs. Linux is everywhere.
IBM has remained one of the last haven for commercial Unix, and offers its AIX. And even IBM is already switching to Linux, which cost her $ 34 billion . Serious move: spend so much money on, in fact, commercial Linux, and even on a competitor of its own design. Interestingly, the fastest supercomputer is owned by IBM , and it runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, not AIX.
Is Linux Better Than Unix?
Not. They are about the same, but the first has the advantage of being able to run on anything from supercomputers to Raspberry Pi. There is access to the source code, to a network of dedicated users and members of the development team, and access to it is free.
If you need commercial support, this is also possible - from Red Hat, Canonical, and Oracle. This was one of the critical reasons Linux was able to replace Unix, as many companies do not trust free software. It was easier for them to pay for support. Linux did not rise because it was free. Commercial Linux helped defeat commercial Unix.
Is Linux more successful than Unix? Define success. If it is more diverse and mass use, then yes. If this is the largest number of devices running this OS, then yes.
I couldn’t find the answer to one question: is the amount of Red Hat sales exceeding $ 34 billion, the sum of all the money spent on commercial Unix licenses from Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics and others for all the time? Perhaps this single transaction brought Linux to the top spot in terms of commercial success as well.
Did Linux kill Unix?
Yes, Linux killed Unix. More precisely, Linux stopped the Unix movement, and then took its place.
Unix still exists, under its control, critical systems work correctly and stably. And this will continue until the end of support for applications, OS or hardware. If something is really critical to the project and it works, it’s better not to touch it. And I suspect that anyone, somewhere, will still leave a working UNIX or Unix-based OS.
Well, for new installations, there is a sufficiently large variety of Linux to convince someone to install Unix instead, it was very, very difficult.