I gave up after a couple of paragraphs. Maybe I have a short attention span, or maybe this is just the same tired old argument.
During the Unix wars nobody gave a crap for standards, and these only came to be when Unix was starting to get some serious competition from non-unix operating systems.
The problem is, relying too much on standards leads to stagnation, and it is Linux that has prevented unix from standardizing itself into irrelevance.
I'm mostly a Linux guy, I admit, but I have worked, and still do, with other unixes (the ones spelled with all caps) every day and I must say that although they are unix (and I like the unix way of doing things), they are also a pain to work with and not "standard" at all (just put AIX, Solaris and IRIX side by side, and try creating users, managing ACLs, and so forth). The only standard thing about them is the lack of the small features that Linux admins take for granted and that make one's job so much easier (the so called GNUisms). Keeping your tools in the 1980's just because they are "standard" doesn't mean they are any good.
Don't get me wrong, once you have an AIX box humming along, it works just great. But so does a Linux one with added flexibility and "niceness".
During the Unix wars nobody gave a crap for standards, and these only came to be when Unix was starting to get some serious competition from non-unix operating systems.
The problem is, relying too much on standards leads to stagnation, and it is Linux that has prevented unix from standardizing itself into irrelevance.
I'm mostly a Linux guy, I admit, but I have worked, and still do, with other unixes (the ones spelled with all caps) every day and I must say that although they are unix (and I like the unix way of doing things), they are also a pain to work with and not "standard" at all (just put AIX, Solaris and IRIX side by side, and try creating users, managing ACLs, and so forth). The only standard thing about them is the lack of the small features that Linux admins take for granted and that make one's job so much easier (the so called GNUisms). Keeping your tools in the 1980's just because they are "standard" doesn't mean they are any good.
Don't get me wrong, once you have an AIX box humming along, it works just great. But so does a Linux one with added flexibility and "niceness".