Unix is Dead. Long Live Unix!

upstart writes:

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!:

It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat?

Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we've felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn't support AIX - already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX is the last proprietary Unix which was in active development, and constitutes four of the 10 entries in the official Open Group list.

Within Oracle, Solaris is in maintenance mode. Almost exactly six year ago, we reported that the next major release, Solaris 12, had disappeared from Oracle's roadmap. HPE's HP-UX is also in maintenance mode because there's no new hardware to run it on. Itanium really is dead now and at the end that's all HP-UX could run on. It's over a decade since we reported that HP investigated but canceled an effort to port it to x86-64.

The last incarnation of the SCO Group, Xinuos, is still around and offers not one but two proprietary UNIX variants: SCO OpenServer, descended from SCO Xenix, and UnixWare, descended from Novell's Unix. We note that OpenServer 10, a more modern OS based on FreeBSD 10, has disappeared from Xinuos's homepage. It's worth pointing out that the SCO Group was the company formerly known as Caldera, and isn't the same SCO as the Santa Cruz Operation which co-created Xenix with Microsoft in the 1980s.

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