The end is nigh and other myths

Wednesday May 17, 2006

Mark Hall, Computerworld "editor at large" concludes his inaccurate article The end of Unix? with a flourish:

Yes, there's something of a Greek myth in this story.

In his lazy piece he charts the recent successes of Linux as an enterprise-class server operating system, noting that it has come at the expense of "Unix". Which Linux he's talking about, we don't know, nor do we know what he means by "Unix", lumping Sun's Solaris with SGI's IRIX and totally ignoring other popular Unix flavours like BSD. In Mr Hall's world:

Linux, after all, is Unix, but without a closed licensing agreement.

Blimey, SCO will be pleased to hear that. Anyway, Mr Hall appears to be suggesting that operating systems are essentially commodified and that Unix necessarily comes with a closed licensing agreement (OpenSolaris and BSD are available under bona-fide open licensing agreements, something Mr Hall fails to note in his piece). For Mr Hall, then, we may be approaching a Unix armageddon because:

Unix, once the byword for "open systems," has become a synonym for "proprietary." Compared with Windows, of course, Unix remains an "open" platform. Compared with Linux, whose source code has been available to everyone from the get-go, Unix looks closed and proprietary.

Mr Hall appears to be confusing the term "Linux" with "free and open source software". Now, honestly, this was an article about the fate of Unix flavours which focusses primarily on Sun, and which describes how, by being closed source, the platform suffered. Is it so fanciful to think that perhaps, just maybe, the "editor at large" would at least mention the fact that Solaris is now open source?

For Mr Hall, Unix is necessarily closed-source, and therefore doomed. A greek myth? More like a Roman one, that of Pygmalion: the self-fulfilling prophesy.


ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer

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Posted at 12:24PM May 17, 2006 by Patrick Finch in OpenSource
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