In case you thought IBM AIX had a future, IBM’s legacy proprietary Unix, IBM apparently doesn’t. The Register reported Friday that IBM has moved the entire AIX development group to IBM India, apparently their Bangalore office, and placing 80 US-based developers into “redeployment.” That’s a fairly craven way of replacing layoffs with musical chairs, requiring the displaced developers to either find a new position within the company (possibly relocating as well) within some unspecified period, or retire. About a third of IBM’s global staff is on the Indian subcontinent. IBM didn’t publicly announce this move and while it’s undoubtedly good news for IBM India it seems bad news for AIX’s prospects: the technologies IBM thinks are up and coming IBM tends to spend money on, and so an obvious cost-cutting move suggests IBM doesn’t think AIX is one of those things.
The writing’s on the wall for all the remaining commercial UNIX variants. By this point I think most of the work being done on AIX and HP-UX is maintaining the install base and fulfilling support contracts, after which there’s no real reason to keep these platforms going.
Sounds like IBM didn’t learn from their previous attempt to get out of paying unemployment costs by telling workers to move to India or they’re fired.
Sadly this is typical IBM. I don’t understand why any talent would chose to work for IBM at this point. Stodgy culture combined with poor treatment of their senior workers and a side of ageism.
Whilst proprietary UNIX was always on borrowed time, i think it’s sad state of affairs when it will undoubtedly be replace by just another Linux distro. There’s a lot more to the open-source UNIX world than just Linux, and i’m sure a lot would be very well suited to migrating to a BSD.
With AIX and HP-UX about to die, the only Unices left are:
* Solaris
* Illumos
* the four BSDs
* MacOS (if you want to count it as UNIX)
(excluding Unix-like systems such as Linux and QNX of course)
MacOS is the only one in that list that is currently registered as Unix Certified.
Yes, but it’s so different from the rest that it’s usually treated separately. Just like Android is treated separately from “Linux”
Drumhellar,
Probably true, but back in the day Windows NT was also POSIX compliant. But that was not something more than a curiosity experiment.
Yes, Mac OS was more open. They even still upload the source of the kernel. But there is no longer an open community contribution. There is no easy way to build an “OpenDarwin” distribution. And the the vanilla MacOS experience is getting locked down with every iteration:
https://www.osnews.com/story/135741/surprising-consequences-of-macos-environment-variable-sanitization/
(I applaud the community continuing to support the platform despite what Apple does)
POSIX was one of the 4 subsystems shipped with NT, and thus not a curiosity experiment.
OSX being Unix compliant has nothing to do with it’s openness or source code availability.
Solaris is alive? I worked a lot with Solaris 8, 9 and 10 but consider it dead since the release of 5.11.
I’d say we have following Tiers:
1. Tier 1: AIX/Power – minimal, mostly maintenance work on the OS (but system still sold & supported), active development of Power CPU line with good server chips (used not only for milking AIX/IBM i customers, but also sharing technology with IBM mainframes and being used for IBM HPC offerings as well as Linux on Power).
2. Tier 2: Solaris/SPARC – minimal, mostly maintenance work on the OS (but system still sold & supported), no further development of CPU, but new and quite modern systems still available (32-core/256 threads 5.0 GHz it still not so bad in 2023); supporting also x86.
3. Tier 3: HP-UX/Itanium – OS still supported but EOL within 2 years; CPU is doomed and obsolete (top of the line 9760 is 8c/[email protected] GHz, that is slower than 599 USD Mac mini)
4. Tier 4: Dead ones. True64/Alpha and Irix/MIPS. As well as even more niche offerings.
*BSD/MacOS are different beasts for me.