“Linux can learn valuable lessons from its elder cousins in the
enterprise, the proprietary Unixes from the likes of IBM, Sun, and
HP. Those operating systems, in turn, can learn some lessons from
Linux. Comparing the features of the more enterprise-ready Linux
distros with AIX, one of the leading proprietary Unixes, helps
identify some of those lessons.“AIX was developed primarily for administrators, whereas Linux
has been developed for and by hackers. Right from the start, a key
goal of commercial Unixes is to make things easy for the people
running them (though they don’t always succeed). Only recently has
this been a major factor in the Linux world. Some deficiencies can
be fixed with improved tools, while others are more fundamental to
the operating systems…”