Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#11

Post by ilc » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

sarahdellysse wrote: post #10

Back when I worked at OmniTI (from like 2015 to 2017), we had an in-house Illumos neé Solaris distro for cloud servers named OmniOS. I didn't use it too much myself as it was somewhat legacy but all the other devs who used it for prod debugging loved all the dtrace/zfs stuffs on it.

I wouldn't call that proprietary. It was freely available, and I worked with it for a bit, until switching that project to SmartOS, which is also... not proprietary.

Both were excellent systems to work on in dev and prod.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#12

Post by colechristensen » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

In ‘05-10 timeframe we had a selection of Sun machines around the engineering department running various software and were even evaluating new Sun hardware for file servers when ZFS was new.

Later on in eh, 2015 or so I worked at a company providing backup software that was tested and worked with every niche unix hardware under the sun. Usually to support large legacy industrial companies, think defense, materials, etc. who still used the hardware.

Banks will also use these things mostly for legacy reasons. The software got written once and has been working and validated for decades, no reason to rewrite it for a different OS just because.

Price is usually not a major factor when compared to the size of the business and number of employees.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#13

Post by bb88 » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

> 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.

When I worked for $(LargeDefenseContractor) we used Solaris for a defense system we were developing. Over time the older units (based on older hardware) would be passed down to the national guard. I would not be surprised if Solaris was still being used in obscure places in the military.

Solaris 7 was a pretty awesome OS as I recall, but pretty soon Intel and AMD started supporting linux as a workable OS option for their server chips. Then linux on the cloud took off and the rest is history.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#14

Post by stcroixx » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

I worked on a system deployed on AIX for a few years. We used it to distribute batch workloads in parallel across a cluster of machines - no other software and OS did such a thing, maybe still doesn't. The machines themselves were PowerPC RS6000's which only ran AIX. The company already had a close relationship with IBM because they'd been running mainframes for decades. They made tons of money so saving money on licence costs was not important.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#15

Post by brozaman » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

Not myself directly, but about 5 years ago I was doing some work for one space agency and there were some Solaris clusters which were older than me.

I’m pretty certain most if not all are still running.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#16

Post by fffrantz » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

Yep, still running Solaris 11 on a Sun server for SDH/SONET network management. I mean it fits the bill, since both technologies are now ancient.

I can't say bad things about the whole Sun/Solaris combo though. It's rock solid and requires practically no maintenance whatsoever.

Also, since it's completely off the internet, it's not like it could be compromised in any way.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#17

Post by TGRush » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

matt3210 wrote: post #2

I use mac which is a proprietary unix.

Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#18

Post by cafard » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

A friend has his own computer business, and some of his work involves tending to AIX systems. I don't remember now what his AIX customers use their machines for, but one might have been a biology lab.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#19

Post by kjs3 » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

We have a number of financial services apps running on Solaris. The cost of the licenses and hardware is insignificant compared to the cost of porting those apps to something else. You'll find that as the reason most folks stay on these platforms.

We also apparently still have some AIX, but I'm not sure what it supports. AIX is still somewhat popular in financial services; probably others as well.

I know of a couple large HP/UX shops left.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#20

Post by EnigmaCurry » Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

TGRush wrote: post #17

matt3210 wrote: post #2

I use mac which is a proprietary unix.

Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

Can you actually recompile your kernel on Mac? And its functional?

I'll bet this isn't even the source code Apple uses, but rather they have a private fork with extra patches (similar to how Microsoft publishes OSS VS Code, but then uses their own proprietary version for releases).