Re:Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
by jesserwright on Friday December 16, 2022 @02:34PM
(#34019060)
I have not worked in such an environment; I also was born in the late 90s. Certainly a lot of history to catch up on ;)
The license cost will likely balance itself to a reasonable amount in proportion to how much better the proprietary UNIX is than GNU/Linux for the application. The license is worth something serious, it's often - not always - because it is something serious. Even in the unfortunate case of something like Oracle DB - remember who their customers are; money isn't exactly their problem. There may be a whole collection of technical and legal reasons GNU/Linux wouldn't be considered from the start. GNU/Linux is absolutely not the best choice when looking at certain types of centralized high-bandwidth low-latency network applications, and never has been. It has excelled where broad hardware support is needed due to its dynamic community, supporting internet businesses without the aforementioned workload types (scale out rather than scale up / horizontal rather than vertical..) and on personal (consumer grade / intel / non-critical) computers. They likely have next to zero interest in supporting workstations/graphics as that's not their business priority.
If you're UNIX history curious and have access to supported hardware, check out FreeBSD. It is certainly a different flavor than anything post GNU/FSD movement and is one of the largest (open source) old school UNIX communities around today. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/introduction/#nut...
You'll notice macOS has most of the user space from FreeBSD 20 years ago, but a different kernel. FreeBSD can also be bootstrapped and built from source on macOS, thanks to recent DARPA sponsored work.
The license cost will likely balance itself to a reasonable amount in proportion to how much better the proprietary UNIX is than GNU/Linux for the application. The license is worth something serious, it's often - not always - because it is something serious. Even in the unfortunate case of something like Oracle DB - remember who their customers are; money isn't exactly their problem. There may be a whole collection of technical and legal reasons GNU/Linux wouldn't be considered from the start. GNU/Linux is absolutely not the best choice when looking at certain types of centralized high-bandwidth low-latency network applications, and never has been. It has excelled where broad hardware support is needed due to its dynamic community, supporting internet businesses without the aforementioned workload types (scale out rather than scale up / horizontal rather than vertical..) and on personal (consumer grade / intel / non-critical) computers. They likely have next to zero interest in supporting workstations/graphics as that's not their business priority.
If you're UNIX history curious and have access to supported hardware, check out FreeBSD. It is certainly a different flavor than anything post GNU/FSD movement and is one of the largest (open source) old school UNIX communities around today. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/introduction/#nut...
You'll notice macOS has most of the user space from FreeBSD 20 years ago, but a different kernel. FreeBSD can also be bootstrapped and built from source on macOS, thanks to recent DARPA sponsored work.