Unix is dead. Long live Unix! • The Register

It is the top of an period. As The Reg coated final week, IBM has transferred improvement of AIX to India. Why ought to IBM pay for an costly US-based workforce to keep up its personal proprietary taste of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its personal FOSS taste in Pink Hat?

Right here at The Reg FOSS desk, we have felt this was coming ever since we reported that Massive Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn’t support AIX – already almost eight years in the past. Even when it was visibly coming over the horizon, it is a important occasion: AIX is the final proprietary Unix which was in energetic improvement, and constitutes 4 of the ten entries within the official Open Group list.

Inside Oracle, Solaris is in maintenance mode. Virtually precisely six 12 months in the past, we reported that the subsequent main launch, Solaris 12, had disappeared from Oracle’s roadmap. HPE’s HP-UX can also be in upkeep mode as a result of there is not any new {hardware} to run it on. Itanium really is dead now and on the finish that is all HP-UX might run on. It is over a decade since we reported that HP investigated however canceled an effort to port it to x86-64.

The final incarnation of the SCO Group, Xinuos, is still around and provides not one however two proprietary UNIX variants: SCO OpenServer, descended from SCO Xenix, and UnixWare, descended from Novell’s Unix. We word that OpenServer 10, a extra fashionable OS based mostly on FreeBSD 10, has disappeared from Xinuos’s homepage. It is price mentioning that the SCO Group was the company formerly known as Caldera, and is not the identical SCO because the Santa Cruz Operation which co-created Xenix with Microsoft within the Eighties.

There was two Chinese Linux distros which had handed the Open Group’s testing and will use the Unix trademark: Inspur K/UX and Huawei EulerOS. Each corporations have let the relatively expensive trademark lapse, although. However the vital element right here is that Linux handed and was licensed as a UNIX™. And it wasn’t only one distro, though each had been CentOS Linux derivatives. We suspect that any Linux would breeze by way of as a result of a number of many un-Unix-like OSes have handed earlier than.

Different OSes have handed or in all probability simply would, although. IBM’s z/OS is alive and effectively: version 2.5 came out in 2021 and in 2022 Massive Blue started offering cloud instances. z/OS has a Unix-compatible surroundings which has handed the compatibility exams so formally, it is a UNIX™, even when that wasn’t its authentic native API.

The “open” within the identify “OpenVMS” initially referred to the POSIX compatibility it gained with model 5, approach again in 1991, and was first utilized to the brand new model for DEC’s Alpha CPUs. Final 12 months VMS Software released version 9.2 for x86-64 hypervisors (and a single supported field, HPE’s DL380).

Ever since Home windows NT in 1993, Home windows has had a POSIX surroundings. Now, with WSL, it arguably has two of them, and we suspect that if Microsoft had been so inclined, it might have Home windows licensed as an official Unix-compatible OS.

In our current story on Beta 4 of Haiku, we initially mentioned that it wasn’t a Unix. As you’ll be able to see, there’s now an editor’s word hooked up to the top of the story. We heard again from Haiku’s main full-time developer, who vigorously disagreed. To his thoughts, the truth that Haiku now has robust Unix compatibility, with a number of the major Unix directories current in its filesystem, a fairly full set of Unix API calls, a Unix shell, and so forth, signifies that Haiku is kind of undoubtedly a Unix. We really feel that inasmuch as it is a reimplementation of BeOS, with its personal native filesystem, API, GUI and so forth, it is one thing totally different, which provides Unix compatibility as effectively.

However this illustrates the problem of definining exactly what the phrase “Unix” means within the twenty first century. It hasn’t meant “based mostly on AT&T code” since Novell bought Unix System Labs from AT&T in 1993, saved the code, and donated the trademark to the Open Group. Since that point, if it passes the Open Group’s testing (and also you pay a payment to make use of the trademark), it is UNIX™. Haiku hasn’t so it is not. Linux has so it’s. However then so is z/OS, which is a direct descendant of OS/390, or IBM MVS because it was known as when it was launched in 1974. In different phrases, an OS which is not really based mostly on, just like, and even associated to Unix.

Which signifies that the final formally trademarked business UNIX™ is Apple’s macOS 13, which beneath the proprietary GUI layer is usually an open supply OS known as Darwin anyway. The kernel, XNU, is predicated on Mach with an in-kernel “Unix server” derived from FreeBSD.

So, as of 2023, open supply actually has gained. There are extra Unix-like OSes than ever, and a few very un-Unix-like OSes that are extremely appropriate with it, however the official line is, to all intents and functions, useless and gone. All of the proprietary, business Unixes are actually on life help: they are going to get important bug fixes and safety updates, however we can’t be seeing any main new releases.

Ship flowers. ®