OSNews: UNIX’s True Competition: Linux?

“Linux only has a small percentage of the computing market,
however Microsoft already considers it a major competition as the
open source OS steals the hearts of many users. Following the hard
numbers though, Microsoft also increases its market share on both
server and desktop space with time. The only logical explanation is
that Linux steals quite a market share from the traditional UNIX
providers (SCO, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM). But only Sun seems to truly be
in a real Linux trouble, as it is the one with a resistance to
Linux integration to its full product range.

“Many consider Linux as the natural evolution over Unix. It is a
re-implementation, largely compatible and while it doesn’t have all
the features found on high-end UNIX OSes, it contains others that
can’t be found in these propriety, commercial Unices. At the peak
of Linux’s hype in 1999 and 2000, the main Unix providers
re-arranged their strategy to include Linux, as they found that it
just… sells. Except the lower price and the OSS mind share
involved, there is nothing that Solaris, IRIX or AIX can’t do that
Linux can. But the OSS-hype drive is strong enough to re-define the
high-end server market.

“IBM is selling Linux most of the time running under runtime
engines rather than running it as the baseline OS. Linux beefed up
the sales for IBM and in fact the company is very pleased of the
market performance it gets by the the momentum it generates. AIX is
still there, running Linux under virtualization, but where that
leaves AIX as an overall useful OS running without the need of
Linux…?”

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