On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org> wrote:

And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people who have huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people who are building new systems. Indeed even the people with the great legacy chunks of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like the new platforms.

I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore. It has been deployed (along with FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now. It really became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers.

Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS standardization comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard than hundreds of incompatible ones.

I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and Windows in the near future. If you think about it, the future is already here...

--Andy