

Unix. IT should ask for it by name - ccraigIW
http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2009/03/unix_it_should.html

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forkqueue
Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should
have retired at least a decade ago.

Similarly, anyone naive enough to believe that "Any skills, staff, source
code, infrastructure, and solutions you invest in any Unix are portable across
IBM, Sun, Fujitsu, HP, Apple, and generic 32- and 64-bit x86 hardware." really
shouldn't be placed in a position where they have any say over platform
choice.

~~~
cabalamat
> _Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should
> have retired at least a decade ago._

Me too. I did wonder if this was written in the 1990s, but it was actually
written this year. It's silly and clueless.

~~~
biohacker42
I think the audience for the article is pointy haired managers.

And the language they understand sound exactly like the language we understand
but is in fact not the same thing at all!

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interknot
I'm somewhat disappointed that the author doesn't recall Microsoft's XENIX:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix>

<http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2062>

~~~
SwellJoe
Why? It's been dead for 20 years.

~~~
interknot
The author wrote that he's been writing about Unix for decades and mentions
that Microsoft could "attain" the UNIX trademark; I merely thought XENIX would
be worth a note in that context.

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mrbuwch
Funny, because my job at one point involved porting a piece of (C++) software
from Solaris and it was actually rather more difficult than you'd think from
reading this article. Why? Because the two OSs were rather different.
Threading and networking were particularly troublesome and the UNIX trademark
didn't help me. Methinks this guy is making things seem rather more easy than
they really are.

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jcapote
Yea, so the open/unix way is better than windows. I thought we figured this
out about a decade ago? How is this news exactly?

~~~
michael_dorfman
Did you read the article? It's about the UNIX trademark.

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pert
I hadn't read that OS X had become 'real UNIX' (trying to do a 'The Wire'
reference there). That's a very smart move by Apple, as it will help them to
attract OS X ports of traditional UNIX software, such as the big databases,
and will certainly help establish them on the server market.

~~~
ams6110
Oracle 10g (10.1) was available for Mac OS X but they've not kept up and no
11g at all. I think they just found that the number of sales for that platform
was too small.

~~~
SwellJoe
We tinkered with providing complete support for Mac OS X in our products (our
products work on Mac OS X, and just about any other UNIX, but it's not
necessarily easy to install and configure currently)...and found the number of
people using it on web servers is vanishingly small. The cost of hardware is
just dramatically higher for most users (an XServe may be nearly cost-
competitive with equivalent Sun hardware, but compared to low end white-box or
Dell hardware used by most hosting providers for most customers, it's just
insanely expensive). It just wouldn't be possible to run a profitable web
hosting venture on Apple hardware.

I think we have two customers using Mac OS X. To put that in perspective, we
have over 1500 customers using CentOS or RHEL, and a few hundred using Debian
or Ubuntu, and a couple dozen using FreeBSD and Solaris. Admittedly, all of
those systems have full support, but FreeBSD and Solaris had a lot more users
than Mac OS X even before we were supporting it properly.

~~~
pert
Although the Linux distributions have come a long way in terms of hardware
compatibility, I don't think any of them could match a single-vendor (OS and
hardware) solution. I've not used OS X as/on a server, but I assume the
hardware monitoring will be well integrated into the hardware and driver
issues will be rare. I'd therefore say that it's unfair to compare OS X on the
Xserve with the likes of RHEL on Dell, and that a comparison with Sun would be
more realistic.

~~~
ankhmoop
Part of purchasing server hardware from a reputable vendor (even 'whitebox'
hardware) is having guarantees that your server operating system will fully
support the underlying hardware, especially as bulk purchases of tens to
hundreds of thousands of dollars are not rare.

~~~
pert
I agree, but this does not guarantee there will be no driver issues and
monitoring packages (such as the HP PSP and Dell 'OpenManage') do not come as
part of third party operating systems so take time to install. In my opinion
this does not detract from Linux in the enterprise, but does mean that it's
not quite in the same class as OS X on Apple or [Open]Solaris on Sun.

