Davrom Consulting Pty Ltd

This document reflects my own personal observations and opinions of the IT industry over my past 20 years as a SCO UNIX specialist (since 1987), and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employers both past and present. Nor is this document an attempt to slander, it is purely an observation based on personal testimony.

I have often been asked why I have stayed with UNIX and not gone into working with other platform products. It basically comes back to the power of the UNIX operating system itself, its open systems connectivity and its integrity. UNIX has set the standards for the Internet and Browser technology. From Mosaic to Netscape running on UNIX servers, UNIX offered the open access technology for information sharing which today gives us the end results such as the World Wide Web - TCP/IP based technology that has been there all along (DNS, arp, E-mail).

Despite the predictions of doom about the future of UNIX, this robust operating system which I call the 'quiet achiever' soldiered on going from strength to strength. Let me reflect on some of the predictions.

In the late 1980's I was told that Xenix and UNIX would be gone. A new operating system called OS/2 would come out and take over the server market. This superior product would see the demise of all the legacy UNIX sites. After this prediction that resounded through the massive marketing engines, I finally saw the product come out circa 1993/1994. It offered file and print services and not much more than this. I was amazed at how UNIX, without the media hype, had already out-matched and out-performed it in all respects. Not only had UNIX continued to provide its legacy database engine solutions, but with products like Locus PCI, PC/NFS and Lan Manager, UNIX provided the desktop PC user with robust file and print sharing. Samba has since become the main file and print sharing server for UNIX/Linux and is free.

In the early 1990's a new networking technology would replace TCP/IP as it was supposedly outdated, slow, inflexible and the list went on. NetBEUI, a super-set of NetBIOS would replace TCP/IP in networks.

What they actually found was that NetBEUI was un-routable, it spammed networks with millions of packets that went beyond routers and brought large networks to their knees. Viewing the network neighbourhood meant you could see every network device running the NetBEUI protocol.

What amazed us all next was the complete about-face and TCP/IP was all of a sudden the international standard. A previously slandered against UNIX networking protocol was now the base for all networking.

By now, the early to mid 1990's, NT was tipped to wipe out UNIX everywhere. Here again we heard the echoes of the OS/2 campaign. With all of its media engines running hot in a world wide blitz, NT was going to rule everything.

For those who really understand the technology and strengths from both sides, NT will never replace UNIX servers. The reliability of enterprise based UNIX servers and the almost non-existent need to reboot the servers (uptimes of 100-200 days plus) makes UNIX the obvious and only choice for non-stop server solutions. A workgroup based server, with all its RAM and add-in packages, will never provide the reliablity of a UNIX server.

Let us put things in perspective and look beyond the marketing hype. NT, Windows XP/2xxx, Netware, OS/2, AS400 and UNIX all have their place in the business world today. The key is integration of the technologies - here UNIX shows true Open Systems conformance. By setting the TCP/IP networking standard and having a legacy asynchronous background, the UNIX operating system allows you to interface with virtually any device and with any other Operating System Platform. It has formed the backbone of networking standards. UNIX is a standard in itself.

Another trend that is amusing to reflect on from the late 1980's to present day is the massive swing from centralised servers for central storage of information, and back again. The 'workgroup' was initially introduced as the solution of the future and large organisations installed hundreds or smaller workgroups, only to find they in fact lost their ease of communication and file access, coupled with the huge administration nightmare. So it was back to centralised servers we came. Through all this UNIX never needed to change, it just got on with serving the requirements of the networked and non-networked users. It didn't try to re-define standards or 'domains', it just focussed on improving its core technologies.

With the world-wide massive swing of the user-base towards the Linux offerings one can only applaud the power of UNIX as a platform - Linux with its entry level offerings as an Internet gateway, e-mail server and web server, show the world that the UNIX operating system offers a robust and in the case of Linux, minimal expence, server platform. As an application server with both software vendors and hardware vendors endorsing their products as "Linux Approved", there can be no doubt that Linux is here to stay. As a client Desktop coupled with SUN Microsystem's StarOffice (and the later OpenOffice), you don't need to run Windows to be compatible with other non-UNIX users. And the cost (or lack thereof of cost) speaks for itself.

And now we actually have a site dedicated to show how the cost of ownership for UNIX/Linux is far greater for business? While being absolutely the opposite in truth, the proof is the countless companies that have been running their business solutions on dedicated application and Internet UNIX/Linux servers at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives (and less security holes and requirement for OOPs patches). Surely the days of being able to snow the I.T consumers with incorrect facts are gone? (resounds of attempts to pull wool over eyes and perhaps even view consumers as sheep - or more smoke and mirrors to bedazzle) Let's consider how long UNIX/Linux servers actually last in terms of years with little or no updating/upgrading. And perhaps I should not mention that most Linux installations only cost the time it takes for a tech to install it as most Linux versions are free.

Market resistance to MS Vista has been strong simply due to the fact that yet again you have to upgrade to run some of the newer products - and Vista doesn't let you run on your older hardware or run most of your old software that may have software driver dependencies. It actually costs money to downgrade from Vista to XP on a new Laptop - huh?

Despite the attempts to scare people away from Open Source (Free) software, the non-MS alternatives are proving to customers to be equal if not better. Citing products like: OpenOffice, Apache, PHP, Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, Gimp, Purple Pidgin, MTAs (Sendmail, PostFix, Exim) - these are a small portion of software out there that runs on any platform and once again are completely free to the end user and businesses alike.

If Open Source is so bad why is MS so keen to strike up parternships with Novel (Suse Linux) and Xandros Linux - can only be a market strategy to make sure the user pays.

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