"In the final installment of this special three-part series, our
industry experts from across all major engineering applications
give us their opinions on the OS battle pitting NT against Unix and
Linux against both of them...."
Mark Kostovny, C-Solutions:
"Unix will be displaced by Windows because some of the advantages
of a Unix workstation have finally disappeared with the recent
Windows-based workstations reaching 1000MHz with excellent graphics
cards. When the boxes are relatively the same, then ease of use and
standardization become the deciding factor, and Windows is the sure
winner in that area."
"Linux will become the new Unix standard and will dominate in
the server market and slowly take over in the Unix workstation
market. Therefore, many CAD/CAM packages will be porting to Linux
in the next couple of years to cover the shrinking percentage of
the market that will stay in the Unix world."
Chris Christopher, Hewlett-Packard:
"It really depends upon the application that the engineer works
with the most. For example, simple CAD applications have already
been ported to Windows, and engineers are using these applications
without any performance degradation. In fact, in many cases ISVs
have added features/functionalities to the application and improved
application performance thanks, in large part, to the processor
improvements from Intel."
"However, for engineers using EDA applications, their immediate
future is most decidedly still Unix. Engineers performing analysis
and simulation tasks are showing a keen interest in Linux-on-Intel.
In fact, at HP we are seeing a number of customers requesting Linux
clusters."
"Our customers are telling us that both HP-UX and Linux will
remain an integral part of the engineering landscape because of
their advantages in reliability, scalability, and capability."
Mitch Free, ManufacturingQuote.com:
"Linux will eventually replace Unix, but it will not replace
Windows as a de facto standard in the engineering environment.
While Linux offers advantages over Windows for engineering
applications, those advantages do not present a business case for
software developers to make the investment to develop their code to
run under Linux."
