“Rumors of the demise of the venerable Unix operating system
have been greatly exaggerated. In the last 18 months,
Unix-type systems have enjoyed a renaissance in the embedded,
desktop and server worlds as the platform of choice for mission-
and business-critical applications. Much of the resurgence of Unix
arises from the adoption of Linux and the success of the
open-source movement.”
“A number of important technical factors conspire to make
Unix-type systems attractive to today’s systems designers:
reliability and fault-avoidance afforded by Unix process-based
memory protection; a modular, hierarchical application model; open
“tinker toy” application building blocks; numerous options for
distributed computing and high availability; standard networking
built upon Internet Protocol; and broadly ported operating system
and application code targeting off-the-shelf CPU
architectures.”
“Both regulatory-dictated standards and customer expectations
demand high software quality and at least the intention to ship
bug-free code. Much of the appeal of the open-source movement
arises in direct response to the cavalier attitude of desktop
software vendors toward software quality, and the higher-quality
software that is crafted on top of Linux and other open Unix
platforms.”