181–190 of 221 posts
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Well, Android is Linux, does that count as "Unix"? I think there's a lot more Android world-wide than iOS/macOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS/etcOS combined?
It depends on the definition of UNIX, but typically Linux doesn’t count as UNIX. You can draw a continuous—if very torturous—line between Bell Labs’ UNIX original codebase and modern macOS/iOS.
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RHEL is not free, but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world. RHEL is open source, yet it is also proprietary. Yes, if you wanted to build from source you can, for free, but you get no access to the repos or service and you have to strip out all references to Red Hat (trademark / copyright infringement) if you want to use it commercially. So, ya if you want to use it at home or to learn, it's free.
Isn't that what CentOS is? edit: just googled, seems dead these days, but Rocky Linux is more or less the same thing
Before it was Fedora -> Red Hat
Now it is Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> Red Hat
I used to work for Sherwin-Williams. The in-store computers run some custom *nix OS. The software that company runs on is a text based ui that hasn't changed since it was introduced in the 90s. They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking. But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard dri…
Proprietary Unixes are frequent and have probably made up 75% of my career including current massive project. Note these are modern and up to date, usually purchased brand new for implementation project hardware and software, not inherited legacy stuff (which seems to set me apart from most respondents here)
Several reasons but note I have very bottoms up perspective.
1. Support. I think this is the major thing. Having a reliable long term vendor with pricey well written steady support model is important to companies who use erp.
2. Related is perception and reality of stability. Aix on power is as proprietary as it gets. These things get rebooted once or twice a decade. Hardware upgrade to another frame is live migration through firmware. It is not fancy or pretty but God dammit baby it works. Perception is there too - that Linux scales well out but not up, that it's vendor support is not at same level, that it moves too fast and breaks things, etc.
3. Deals and contracts. There may be legacy hardware footprint or client may get package deal with application middleware database and hardware.
My personal perspective? Proprietary Unix is ahead on internals, behind on shiny,boring and reliable. There's a lot to be said for distributed cheap boxes over proprietary big boxes. But I don't think modern SREs fully grok how much I never had to deal with hardware or OS issue or outage on these things. Anecdata sample size =1 + gossip, but it's just a very different mindset and, here's the trick, there's nothing inherently wrong with that mindset, even if it's not currently in vogue.
I prefer to work with Linux for a few reasons, including shiny and resume-helpful, but honestly, from business / management perspective, a grouchy experienced aix sysadmin on Power stack makes my job a lot easier.
Edit / p.s. Again these are modern os'es and support Gui and tunnelling.... But I don't think anybody ever uses them. The application stack running on top is certainly modern and gui/Web, but installing and supporting OS, database, middleware and apps is all cli, very obscure, very efficient, very powerful.
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90s to early 2000s, it was "fun" to accidentally use "killall" on the wrong machine. System V derived UNIXes really mean "kill all", not what Linux meant with it ("kill all with a certain name"), and what today is better represented by "pkill" anyway.
Also reboot, which is safe on Linux, but does an instant power cycle with no proper shutdown on others.
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RHEL is not free, but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world. RHEL is open source, yet it is also proprietary. Yes, if you wanted to build from source you can, for free, but you get no access to the repos or service and you have to strip out all references to Red Hat (trademark / copyright infringement) if you want to use it commercially. So, ya if you want to use it at home or to learn, it's free.
> but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world The word "free" is well-defined in this context (I carefully used it in the phrase "free software"). A free software respects the 4 freedoms given in the free software definition [1]. You can run it for all purpose, study it, redistribute it, distribute your modified version. Within the law, of course. Always. Licenses are restricted by the law. > RHEL is…
Open source software can cost money, and still be open source...it currently exists.
Yes, mostly IBM's AIX and a few ... ah the name escapes me now ... the top notch graphical design workstations of the time. The reason are maintenance contracts for very long-term systems that never upgrade (they are ultimately completely replaced by something else). They are similar to that old bulb in a fire station[1]: it is strictly forbidden to breathe when around these systems, if you sneeze you are fired on th…
Silicon graphics workstations?
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I can't speak for OP or their particular use case (because I don't know about it), but kubernetes is not a panacea for large scale batch processing. For example, large banks need to securely, reliably, and very efficiently process an unfathomable amount of transactions[1]. In this case, kubernetes would be a giant waste of resources and complexity. The former one hampers throughput, the latter one means security and…
Interesting, can you give rough order of magnitude for the txn/s throughout achieved? Would also be really interested on more info or pointers to the hardware reliability mechanisms!
I heard that Boeing archived an Apollo Domain network, because some engineering documentation was developed on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain
offtopic but didn't know wiki allowed slashes in article titles
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> but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world The word "free" is well-defined in this context (I carefully used it in the phrase "free software"). A free software respects the 4 freedoms given in the free software definition [1]. You can run it for all purpose, study it, redistribute it, distribute your modified version. Within the law, of course. Always. Licenses are restricted by the law. > RHEL is…
Look up the actual definition of "proprietary". If a company owns it, it's proprietary...even open source software. Open source software can cost money, and still be open source...it currently exists.
It's not what this word means in this context. Almost nobody uses proprietary this way to describe software, because it's used as opposed to FLOSS, and because it would be useless: a piece of software always belongs to someone unless it reached public domain (which is not many pieces of software). It always has one or several authors, working for someone else or not, so by this definition any software would be proprietary. Why call a piece of software proprietary then if it's always the case?
It's like proprietary protocol meaning "non-standard", "specific". Proprietary has several meanings, depending on the context.
You need to use the words the way they are by everybody to be understood correctly. Or stick to your usage and you'll end up in futile debates again and again. Or try to convince people that your usage is the right one if you have strong reasons to do this. But good luck with that. Proprietary software is used with this meaning since the 80s and it's not controversial AFAIK.
> Open source software can cost money, and still be open source...it currently exists.
I know, I work at a FLOSS company.