Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Every so often I hear somebody come along and compare the fragmentation of the various Linux distributions today to the “UNIX Wars” of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I find it somewhat funny when that happens, as I think that the situation is quite different.

First of all, the article mentions there being over 300 different Linux distributions. There were nowhere near that many UNIX vendors in the late 1980s. So the scale of fragmentation isn’t even remotely close.

And the nature of the products are different. Most Linux distributions use the same kernel and much of the same userland source code. This wasn’t necessary the case during the 1980s. Between the BSD- and System V-based systems, we had at least two fairly distinct codebases. Then there were unique systems, including Coherent. So when it comes to the Linux distributions, we’re talking about essentially all the same code. Although the UNIX variants usually had a common beginning at some point in time, they had diverged to the point where each variant was quite unique in its own way.

For instance, we knew that Sun workstations running SunOS were often quite good for developers and power users. SGI IRIX-based systems were useful for tasks requiring a powerful GUI, or for other multimedia-related jobs. HP-UX was often good for back-end database related roles, as was AiX. Of course, BSD/386, SCO UNIX, SCO ODT and Xenix were often used on x86 PCs. Each UNIX variant tended to have its own niche when it came to maximizing performance and minimizing cost.

When it comes to most Linux distributions today, we have much more variability, even within a single distribution. A base Debian or Ubuntu system can quickly be adapted to provide a workstation environment, or be used as a server, or even slimmed down to a minimalistic system. A wide range of hardware platforms are also supported, compared to the UNIX systems which only tended to support the vendor’s hardware.

We also can’t forget that commercial UNIX was driven by hardware vendors who needed software to run on their various systems. This is not so much the case with the Linux distributions of today. Although a great number do receive funding from corporations or other businesses, and others receive academic or government funding, many of them are community-based projects. The priorities of community-based projects often differ significantly from profit-driven ventures.

So as we can see, the fragmentation of the Linux distributions today really can’t be compared to the different UNIX varieties we could choose from in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two situations involve far too many differing factors for any similarity to be seen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Linux, Software, Solaris, UNIX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.