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IBM is the only one really left...for now. They just shuttered US-based AIX development and moved everything to India, so the writing is on the wall.

HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.

SGI IRIX is long dead. RIP.

SCO (the part with a product, not the part that fails miserably at litigation) got sold to someone noone has ever heard of and probably never will. I speculate there's an SMB PoS market out there supporting it and that'll turn out just as well as the OS/2+ATM market did. No innovation going on there, just milking a dwindling revenue stream. I doubt anyone has sold a Xenix license in decades.




> HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.

I figured as much for HP/UX. The failure of Itanium was the death knell there.

I mostly lump Solaris together with Illumos/SmartOS. Is there a good reason not to (unless when talking about Oracle specifically)?


Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction. I dunno, I'm not so much involved in the Solaris world anymore (having started on SunOS 3.5), but I suppose I take them at their word.


> Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction.

That's fair.

I know that, after Oracle re-closed OpenSolaris, they can't (legally) incorporate the innovations happening in Illumos into Solaris proper, so the 2 siblings will continue to drift apart.

And it sounds like there was quite a lot of bad blood that proceeded the founding of Illumos (unsurprising when Oracle is involved), so I'm not super surprised that users would talk that way.


That matches my perspective. I personally don't get the impression that Illumos, et. al., have the critical mass for a robust long-term future, but I surely don't see all the places it's being used. Fortunately, I guess, a lot of the nifty things Solaris brought to the table (ZFS, dtrace, etc.) have been pulled up into the BSDs and Linux with varying degrees of success.




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