I was born in the late 90s so by the time I got involved in technology, my introduction to Unix and Unix-flavored systems was limited to Linux and MacOS. However, I've read about the history of Unix at Bell Labs, the BSD systems derived from research Unix, and the eventual commercial releases of Unix System V from AT&T themselves. I also see that HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris are apparently still maintained and get releases, which suggests that they are still being used in production in some places.
I'm curious if anyone here currently works (or has very recently worked) somewhere where proprietary Unix is still used for production. If so, can you tell me what they're used for and why those deployments haven't been moved to an appropriate Linux distribution?
Not suggesting Linux is necessarily better for all use cases, just wondering what keeps these small number of entities clinging to closed-source Unix with presumably pricey license costs.
This used to run on a Compaq Proliant server (huge noisy Intel 486 tower) until the end of the millennium or so, then was converted into a VM. First on VMware, then on Hyper-V, where it has been running comfortably on various hardware (Intel Dell PowerEdge, AMD SuperServer) since.
Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access. So ever since this has been converted to a VM, it runs on a dedicated VLAN (666, just to make sure nobody ever misunderstands the true evil underneath...), with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge (coded up in Visual Basic.NET using some long-long-deprecated libraries) connecting it to the outside world.
That VB.NET kludge was recently upgraded to .NET 6, in order to get TLS 1.2 support. This was surprisingly uneventful, and I'm pretty sure this abomination gets to live another decade or so.
Ah, yes, a career in IT... Always on the forefront of cutting-edge tech...
(Later edit to, like, actually answer the question: licensing costs are nonexistent: SCO is gone anyway, and we don't require any support/updates. Migrating to Linux might be an option, but is most likely going to be hugely painful, and the existing VM scenario Just Works for everyone involved. Security and such is not a real issue: only a handful of internal users have highly-restricted access via a proxy)