[BLU/Officers] BLU talk on State of the UNIX Family"?

[Bill Ricker]

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 9:36 AM John Abreau <jabr at blu.org> wrote:

> It's been a long time since we last had a talk involving non-Linux topics.
>

BSD lives.
Commercial Unix continues.



> It might be interesting to have a meeting regarding the state of UNIX in
> today's world. I imagine many traditional UNIXes may be moribund at this
> point, but a historical overview might be interesting.
>
> 1. What traditional UNIXes are still in active use and/or being actively
> developed?
>

*UNIX liveness* (*initially from same Wikipedia SVG
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg>
as below*;* updated from individual Wikipedia pages*)

   - *✓ **System V* R4 descent
      - *✓ **AIX* 7.3 (IBM; proprietary; Dec 2021) Long term support, slow
      update cycle?
      - *✓ **HP-UX* 11i+ v3 ( proprietary; May 2022)
      - *✓ **Oracle Solaris* 11.4 SRU51 (ex Sun; proprietary; Oracle, Nov
      2022)
      *OpenSolaris* dead long since at Oracle ex-Sun;
      living OpenSolaris forks (FLOSS):
      *✓*illumos/OpenIndiana (Dec 2021),
      *½*SchilliX?, SmartOS (2020),
      *✓*OmniOScd (2022),
      others might be alive-ish also?

      - *✓ **BSD* (with Sys V + Gnu mixins; FLOSS)
   - *✓ *OpenBSD 7.2 (Oct 2022)
      - *✓ *NetBSD 9.3 (Aug 2022)
      - *✓ *DragonFly BSD 6.2.2 (June 2022)
      - *✓ *FreeBSD 13.1 (2022)
      - *✓ *MacOS (OSX) 13.0 (*mix of open source and proprietary,
      proprietary result*) (Oct 2022)
      ("Ventura" ; mostly FreeBSD userland + Darwin 22.1.0 kernel, + some
      OpenBSD network bits)

2. "Whatever happened to the <n> operating system", where <n> is one of
>         { BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Darwin, HURD, AT&T Plan9, SGI Unix,
> ... }
>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
shows quite a few as live (listed above) and
a number of lines of descent as having
*ended: Minix, *(*academic kernelized IX-ish OS that inspired
non-kernelized Linux*)
*OpenServer (**Xenix lineage*
*), UnixWare (*aka* Unix sVr5)*;
*OSF/1 (*incl* DEC/HP Tru64) *
*SGI'*s was *IRIX,*
*Cray UNICOS* (orig. "CX-OS",  UNIX, later Linux; disc.)


Others -

   - *MACH kernel: *CMU developed.
      - *OSF Mach - **OSF/1 *Unix ported to Mach. Last seen as HP Tru64,
      2012.
- *NeXTSTEP  *(BSD+Mach) - long gone. Even OpenStep OS  on Mach gone.
      (GnuStep continues the API etc, but not as OS).
- *OS/2 Warp PPC (Mach) "Workplace OS" *- never shipped
- *✓ Darwin* (Mach XNU, *non-free*) (kernel): Lives. See *MacOS* under live.
      - *GNU Hurd & GNU Mach (*Mach microkernel+ Gnu Hurd services*)*:
      Schrödinger's Cat or Monty Python Parrot status!

*Unclear if there is Hurd development; Hurd is not promoted by FSF/GNU
      currently. There is supposedly a Gnu Hurd NG project in design
to try again
      at GNU soup-to-nuts again.*
      4 of 6 official distributions officially discontinued, including one
      of the showcases,
      Gentoo Hurd;
      Arch Hurd (not officially discontinued but is ^*rolling^* release
      last updated 2019, so *de facto* ceased without even a wimper -
      *but that was 8 years after it was pronounced deceased the first
      time, so paritial points for trying*?) ;
      so seems only
      *✓ Debian GNU/Hurd* ( Aug 2021 release; dev build in Dec 2022)
      continues - *may be one guy tho*?
      (*but is not among the Gnu/Linux variants purist enough for FSF/GNU
      endorsement, presumably due to "optionally free" components included?*
      )

      - *Plan 9:* AT&T/Bell's final  P9 2015 Fourth Edition release was *post
   facto * open sourced.
      - *½ **Plan9Legacy* is a patched edition of Fourth's legacy FLOSS
      code, so *somewhat* live (on life support? zombie?).
      - *½ Plan 9 from User Space* (aka plan9port, p9p, 9fans) is the good
      parts of Plan 9 userspace ported to traditional *n*x, so
somewhat live (12
      threads on mailing list in 11 months, as many as 5 replies!),

* nearly fossilized; and abandons the kernel/filesystem/IO breakthroughs,
      so no longer an OS.*
      - *½* 9P protocol (9P2000) reportedly available on Linux (as a better
      NFS)?
      *But that's a plugin not an OS*

Other POSIX userspace projects (for Windows)

   - GNU Cygwin (*still live*?)
   - MKS Toolkit
   - WSL (MS's 3d try?)
   - ??


Any thoughts on where we might find either a speaker to give an general
> overview, or perhaps separate speakers for each OS?
>

My AIX guys at IBM have moved on in the last decade, i don't have any
current AIX contacts.
Similarly my HP-UX, Oracle Solaris (it hurts to type that) contacts will
have been up or out in 9 years.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/officers/attachments/20221203/59d3415f/attachment.html>