Lot of people seem unclear about whether at all there is UNIX today. And people think that other than Linux or Ubuntu or whatever there is nothing else and that Linux is a new form of UNIX and that UNIX is dead.
The confusion is understandable since unless one is really curious and has the ability to learn on their own and is confident enough to think for oneself such ideas do not enter one's consciousness. Or you need a really good teacher in one of your semesters in college. Having handled corporate trainings and having dealt with engineers I feel that people are generally not equipped to learn on their own and the curiosity and real interest towards technology, engineering and programming is lacking. But then our IT industry also is responsible for it but you cannot blame external factors for the attitude of a bunch of people. Okay, so Linux is really not new UNIX or a derivative of it though both are somewhat true too. Linux has found lot of interest from hackers and a lot of UNIX ideas can be found in Linux. And UNIX is not dead. It will never die. It gets absorbed and you can see its presence in various forms not only in Linux but also in Windows. There is Cygwin, MingW and many others in Windows world and even Windows NT apparently has some Posix ideas though I am not sure if that is really true. So instead of thinking of UNIX as an OS it serves to think of UNIX as a philosophy or a foundation. And in today's world all the BSDs are UNIX OSes and Solaris, OpenSolaris, HP UX, AIX and few others are also being used here and there. There is also no idea of distribution in the world outside Linux. When you take common embedded systems, routers, firewalls, mail servers, load balancers and even telecom equipment they all run some form of Linux or UNIX. In a veiled form UNIX always exists. Linux is not going to kill UNIX ever. And UNIX users are not going to switch to using Linux instead.Everything has a place of its own. And one can be equally comfortable with both since there are plenty of similarities. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
