Contributed by Linux Today reader Brent Metzler
A bunch of companies developed hardware and needed an OS. They
had 2 choices. They could build an OS from scratch that would be
“unique” or they could build an OS from an already strong
sourcebase. In either case they ended up with a competely new OS,
it didn’t really matter where they started from. So the fact that
they all started from the same thing doesn’t make the products
fragmented.
This is where people “miss” it. Solaris and IRIX are in
practical terms as different as Solaris and NT. They aren’t
intended to be fully compatible. When I look at the Mozilla source,
I see code specific to Windows, Linux, Mac, BeOS, and OS/2. I could
very well say that the desktop computer market is fragmented, with
more evidence than the Unix/Server market. The Unix/Server market
is cognate, not intended to all be identical.
You say that you can compile NT and it works on Intel and Alpha.
This is not a good analogy to compare to, say, Oracle running on
multiple server platforms. NT is NT no matter what chip it runs on.
NT will never be OS/2, or Mac, or anything else. Solaris now runs
on Sparc and Intel chips. Compare the ease of recompiling Solaris
apps for sparc and Intel, and NT for Intel and Alpha. Although I
have no experience I am confirming with a friend the differences
with Solaris on Sparc and Intel. I would seriously be surprised if
there are any.
Similar does not mean bad. It does not mean a carbon copy. I see
it as a good thing that the companies choose to base their OS’s off
of a common beginning. Each company has a strength that the other
companies don’t. By being similar, and not different like the
desktop market it provides a greater ease to porting software to
multiple platforms.
Wanting even greater uniformity in the server market, the Posix
standard was born. The Posix standard provides a common framework
across multiple OS’s. This is not an acknowledgement that the
server market was somehow “fragmented” before, but a continuing
innovation in the value that the server market provides. As far as
being fragmented over the Posix standard, which is a valid concern,
which OS’s do not support POSIX.1 right now? Okay, so NT does pay
lip service to POSIX.1, but for just one example of what this
means, check out what CAI had to say about porting
their application to NT. Because Microsoft wants to compete in the
server market, I would say that this lack is a fragmentation of the
server market. I guess that the question should be, if there is a
fragment in the market, which side should you choose? The side that
fragments to keep market share, or the side that decides to provide
value and real innovation to the customer.
What about fragmentation of a single OS? When I write an
application for an OS, I think that I’d like it to be able to write
it for the OS and have it run on all the various incarnations of
that OS. For instance, I am going to use Linux here because it has
been ported to the largest number of different hardward platforms.
Linux will run from the smallest
embedded systems, all the way up to 64bit chips such as the
SPARC and the Alpha. I can be reasonably
confident that *unoptimised* code I write for Linux on one hardware
platform will probably also compile/run on another hardware
platform. Windows also runs on different hardware, with different
implementations of the OS. An Application I write for NT, may not
work on 98 or CE. It may work, but probably require at least a
little porting. I’d consider this fragmentation of an OS. When
Windows 2000 is finally release Microsoft is rumored to have 9
implementations of the OS which will replace the diverse OS’s that
Microsoft currently supports. Will we see an end to fragmentation
inside the Windows OS at that time? I seriously doubt it. I
consider the failure to write a single piece of code that compiles
over the implementations of one OS more severe then code that
doesn’t compile on more then on OS, for instance, Windows and Mac,
or NT and AIX, or Unixware and Solaris, although they last 2 have
the greatest possibility of compiling identical code. Does the fact
that they have a greater chance of compiling identical code have
any meaning as to whether they are more fragmented then the other
combinations?
In conclusion, what am I trying to say here: Microsoft spends a
lot of money on marketing their products. They also are seen as a
credible source. So they can say things that aren’t true and people
will accept it without researching the facts. Moreover, there are
many people who are not able to perhaps understand what is being
talked about and has to take whatever is said as being fact.
Perhaps these are doctors, or lawyers, or just plain old managers.
They may be the smartest people in the world, but it’s not their
job to know about the server market. Microsoft says that they bring
value to the server market by having a unified server OS, while the
rest of the market is greatly fragmented. I hope to have shown in
this document that this is false and that the server market is
basically cognate, and not therefore not fragmented, but actually
has a standard for providing a unified interface. It was also my
desire to show that it is really Windows that is fragmented in the
server market, and not only fragmented in the server market, but
also fragmented in it own implementations.
— This is the first part of (hopefully) an ongoing work. (C)
Copyright 1999 Brent Metzler