# What is Unix today?



## RimRunner (Oct 22, 2017)

The list of currently supported OSs with official UNIX certification from OpenGroup seems to look something like this: AIX, EulerOS, HP-UX, Inspur K-UX, MacOS, OpenServer 5, 6 & 10, Solaris, z/OS.

Now this official definition probably does not look very satisfying from the point of view of a hacker who cares a bit about Unix. It contains OSs that are Linux (at least Inspur K-UX) and z/OS looks being just Unix compatible (not even a Unix clone) and of course the list does not contain "unofficial" descendants of Unix.

If we discard this official list as inappropriate, then what do you think that counts as Unix today? All these free software BSD projects, right? And maybe those industrial OSs like AIX, HP-UX, OpenServer and Solaris which are clearly descendants of previous Unix versions? What else? MacOS is an unclear case to me (have not used it).

Opinions?


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## Cthulhux (Oct 22, 2017)

The only living Unices (IMO: SysV derivatives) are AIX, Solaris, and illumos (with its distributions). Systems trademarked UNIX are not Unices.
OpenServer switched to FreeBSD a while ago.


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## RimRunner (Oct 22, 2017)

Cthulhux said:


> The only living Unices (IMO: SysV derivatives) are AIX, Solaris, and illumos (with its distributions). Systems trademarked UNIX are not Unices.
> OpenServer switched to FreeBSD a while ago.



I would be highly interested to hear why do you classify only SysV based OSs as Unix.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 22, 2017)

Because those are the last Unices with a direct code heritage from the original Unix.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 22, 2017)

RimRunner That *one* Linux distro only came on scene a year or two ago and is a custom creation in a super computer lab no one has access to. Until then, there were no and are no Linux distros certified as UNIX.


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## vermaden (Oct 22, 2017)

RimRunner said:


> The list of currently supported OSs with official UNIX certification from OpenGroup seems to look something like this: AIX, EulerOS, HP-UX, Inspur K-UX, MacOS, OpenServer 5, 6 & 10, Solaris, z/OS.
> 
> Now this official definition probably does not look very satisfying from the point of view of a hacker who cares a bit about Unix. It contains OSs that are Linux (at least Inspur K-UX) and z/OS looks being just Unix compatible (not even a Unix clone) and of course the list does not contain "unofficial" descendants of Unix.
> 
> ...



Inspur K-UX is a modified Red Hat Linux.

Basically anyone can buy such certification, it would cost about $100 000 for suck certificate to get the FreeBSD the 'UNIX03' badge ...

As for old 'real' UNIX systems ... it does not look good.

Oracle Solaris is pretty much dead:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/62320/

HP's HP-UX is dead already since there will be no more new Itanium chips from Intel and HP does not plan to port HP-UX to X86. Last real release (11i v3) was in 2007 which was decade ago. Everything is in bytes, kilobytes or blocks ... I meand while using the commands on HP-UX. There is no *-h* for *df*/*bdf* or *-m* for *du*.

AIX is also on the road to end, the biggest 'services' that AIX was strong ins was database servers, SAP/ERP scale-up systems and backup/restore systems (like IBM TSM - now Spectrum Protect). As databases become more and more 'distributed' the scale-up power of POWER is not needed much. The latest SAP HANA offering does not even run on AIX, they need SLES for POWER or RHEL for POWER on IBM POWER, so AIX is dead end here. There are also backup systems, but IBM TSM works as good on Linux today. The other thing is the POWER chips themselves, IBM PAYED about $1.5 billion for GlobalFoundaries (AMD/ARM owner) to get these IBM POWER fabs and make new POWER chips for them, so IBM does not even own their POWER chips anymore. And last but not least, IBM AIX / PowerVM always required HMC for manage/install/usage which was ALWAYS Linux based. In this year its first time that IBM released IBM on POWER (not X86), but its still running Linux ... Currenty there exist 1U IBM POWER servers that are Linux only, the AIX offering are limited only to 'bigger' machines and is smaller then Linux offerings.

The only UNIX from this list that has a bright future is Mac OSX / macOS that is used on Apple devices, it would be interesting to watch next Apple laptops bazed on ARM64 arch with Mac OSX.

z/OS only has UNIX POSIX compatibility, the same way as Windows systems can do a NFS server ...

The future is like:
- There would be only amd64 and arm64 CPUs.
- Everything would run on Linux with small part of the pie for FreeBSD and even smaller part of pie for Illumos.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 22, 2017)

macOS is half-BSD, not Unix.


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## hitest (Oct 22, 2017)

Cthulhux said:


> macOS is half-BSD, not Unix.



Yes.  Very close to FreeBSD.


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## vermaden (Oct 22, 2017)

Cthulhux said:


> macOS is half-BSD, not Unix.


... and BSD is Unix*

Read good explanation about that from this - *http://www.netbsd.org/about/call-it-a-duck.html* - NetBSD page:

[FONT=Georgia]_*About the UNIX trademark*_

_If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it? _

_The answer, of course, depends on whether or not the name `duck' is a trademark! If it is, then the closest that something can get, without permission of the owner of the trademark, is `duck-like.' _

_`UNIX' is a trademark of The Open Group, and NetBSD has not been branded with that trademark. Therefore, *NetBSD is not UNIX*. We refer to it as `UNIX-like' or `UN*X-like.' _[/FONT]


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## Cthulhux (Oct 22, 2017)

NetBSD is neither Unix nor UNIX.


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## RimRunner (Oct 23, 2017)

So it seems that we are witnessing the death of the commercial industrial Unix. I wonder if something significant is going to be lost in the process or is everything that is relevant in them already included in other OSs (or are there possibly some other sort of noteworthy losses).


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## ekingston (Oct 23, 2017)

RimRunner said:


> So it seems that we are witnessing the death of the commercial industrial Unix. I wonder if something significant is going to be lost in the process or is everything that is relevant in them already included in other OSs (or are there possibly some other sort of noteworthy losses).



If you dig a bit deeper into the early days of UNIX, you will find that most of the user tools from UNIX were created at universities and are what we would call "open source" today. Those tools evolved into the POSIX standard UNIX tools that FreeBSD uses and were the inspiration for a lot of the GNU userland tools.

The closed part was the kernel and initial load tools (sysv-init). The BSD project (not FreeBSD but what came before it) was created to build a new kernel and load tools (rc scripts) that were open source. At least, that is how I understand it.

Additionally, the old UNIX (including sysv-init) came with source code. While this doesn't apply to most of the newer "certified" Unicies (like AIX or HP-UX), the source for the older stuff still exists at several universities around the world. And a good chunk of Solaris got split out for the OpenSolaris and derivatives, which have source available online.

We are likely to lose some of what was developed for the dead Unicies (OpenServer 6, UnixWare, and HP-UX) but how much of those was actually revolutionary? Anything really useful would be noticed and the concepts introduced to the existing open source projects. Solaris made a lot of interesting updates (zfs being one example) but much of that is available thanks to OpenSolaris and derivatives.

If you have ever had the opportunity to look inside AIX (or zOS/S390/VMS), you will realize IBM has some interesting things going on but none of those are going anywhere any time soon.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 23, 2017)

Those who think they are doing better than UNIX are bound to copy UNIX.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 23, 2017)

Not quite. Plan9 is not "bound to copy UNIX".


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## vermaden (Oct 23, 2017)

ekingston said:


> If you dig a bit deeper into the early days of UNIX, you will find that most of the user tools from UNIX were created at universities and are what we would call "open source" today. Those tools evolved into the POSIX standard UNIX tools that FreeBSD uses and were the inspiration for a lot of the GNU userland tools.
> 
> The closed part was the kernel and initial load tools (sysv-init). The BSD project (not FreeBSD but what came before it) was created to build a new kernel and load tools (rc scripts) that were open source. At least, that is how I understand it.
> 
> ...


IMHO IBM PowerVM is far more interesting then IBM AIX. Basically AIX and HP-UX are very similar, and while HP-UX keeps everything in plain text config files AIX prefers to keep a lot of data/settings in ODM (kinda like Windows registry).


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## _martin (Oct 24, 2017)

vermaden said:


> I meand while using the commands on HP-UX. There is no *-h* for *df*/*bdf* or *-m* for *du*.



Yeah, that's a bit weird, especially when even in 2007 there was no problem having 100TB database and yet still one has to read bdf output in kB. 
It's the pity though what happened to HP-UX ; the minute development was moved away from US it started to show.   

And the story of Solaris should be in every management book -- it's the example how you can fail even with a golden product in your hands. 



gpatrick said:


> Essentially the world will all be driving East German Trabant cars instead of something of quality from Italy, Sweden, Germany, Japan, US, or another country who innovates.



Side note: well, given what those engineers had to work with and what resources they had it was actually good engineering for that time period.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 24, 2017)

gpatrick said:


> The BSDs essentially came from commercial Unix. Minix from a university.



You _did_ respect that the UCB is basically a University as well, right?


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## ralphbsz (Oct 24, 2017)

RimRunner said:


> The list of currently supported OSs with official UNIX certification from OpenGroup seems to look something like this: AIX, EulerOS, HP-UX, Inspur K-UX, MacOS, OpenServer 5, 6 & 10, Solaris, z/OS.


It is fascinating that of all Unixes that exist today (if you use the above as the definition of "Unix"), one is an operating system that's about 55 years old, and about 20 years older than Unix: z/OS is deep at its core OS/360, from the early 1960's.

I always have a quiz for managers: What are the two greatest books about software engineering?  In my opinion, it's Tom DeMarco's "Peopleware", and Fred Brooks' "tar pit book" (officially called "The Mythical Man-Month").  Everyone has to read the tar pit book, because it explains the pitfalls (pun!) of developing an operating system ... in the early 1960's.  Everything Fred writes there is still true, except today software engineering groups no longer need key punch operators.

By the way, Fred is alive and well, and can occasionally be seen at the Computer History Museum giving talks (no, he is *not* one of the exhibits, he's too old for that).


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