“…So say farewell to one marketing wheeze – and say hello to
another.”
“IBM’s Turek tells us that the ‘L’ in AIX 5RL stands for –
you’ve guessed it, Linux. Purely as an OS – discounting any
applications support – the Linux IA-64 port will be out of the door
at about the same time as the “Monterey” UnixWare, thanks in large
part to the investment from Intel, VA Linux, SGI, Hewlett Packard
and er… IBM.”
“So where does this leave UnixWare? Well, let’s not forget that
the market has steadily been collapsing from under the venerable OS
– with revenues in the most recent two quarters half of their
previous levels. And that’s not through some technical oversight:
UnixWare is far and away the most scalable and capable server OS
for PCs. It’s just that the momentum of Windows 2000 one one side,
and Linux/BSD on the other has absorbed much of the growth in the
server market. The real problem for UnixWare is that its new
owner Caldera doesn’t have much of a vested interest in advancing
the 64bit port. Quite the opposite, in fact: if it’s going to
remain both a leading free software company and remain a leading
server OS vendor, then it’s going to have to put it’s eggs in the
Linux-on-IA64 basket one day. That day may not come just yet –
Intel’s next-generation 32bit P7 processors already look very
competitive – and Intel expects to five to seven years life out of
derivatives from these cores. And of course, AMD’s x86-64 ought to
find a niche, at least for a while, as it offers an incremental
path for customers who really need the 64bit addressing.”