The Future of UNIX


The UNIX System continues to evolve. An abiding virtue of UNIX is its capability to grow and incorporate new features as technology progresses. Undoubtedly, many new features, tools, utilities, and networking capabilities will be developed in the next few years. New capabilities are continually being developed as communities of developers add features and capabilities to Linux and other UNIX variants, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, Darwin, and OpenSolaris. Many developers will continue to volunteer their efforts to create enhancements to UNIX that can be used free of charge. Concurrently, vendors who want to offer the most robust version of UNIX for particular types of applications will continue to develop new features for their proprietary versions of UNIX, including IBM, HP, Sun, Apple, and the SCO Group, with emphasis from IBM, HP, and Sun on increasing the capabilities of UNIX for server and enterprise applications, and Sun and Apple furthering the utility of UNIX on the desktop.

The unification of UNIX that began with the development of UNIX SVR4 has been furthered by the Single UNIX Specification from the Open Group. After wide testing and use, some of the features introduced in different UNIX variants will find their way into later versions of the Single UNIX Specification.

The vast number of creative people working on new capabilities for UNIX assures that it has an interesting and exciting future. There will also probably be many different variants of UNIX, especially those with community of developers and offered free of charge. However, the number of different variants offered by large computer companies will probably decrease as these vendors either work together to unify versions of UNIX or adopt an open-source variant. More UNIX variants will develop to meet specific application and platform needs. Although these different versions of UNIX will generally conform to some base set of standards, such as the Single UNIX Specification, each will contain its own unique set of enhancements. More and more applications will run on an ever-wider range of UNIX platforms through porting collections, binary compatibility and the use of the APIs described in the Single UNIX Specification.

Some people believe that UNIX variants will be increasingly used for desktop computing, as well as portable computing. The pace at which this happens depends on the development of a robust collection of easy-to-use applications that run on UNIX variants, analogous or identical to those running on Windows. UNIX, as implemented in the many variants of UNIX, including those called Linux, will thrive as the operating system of choice for demanding applications on servers, especially for networked environments. It will also be adapted for new hardware platforms of all types. In both of these areas, it will most likely outpace proprietary offerings, including those from Microsoft. The future development of the UNIX System will also be furthered by collaboration over the Internet, and the Internet itself will benefit from new features of UNIX that have been developed to enable networked applications. Finally, UNIX will continue to be used for enterprise and transaction-intensive applications, as vendors ensure that their UNIX platforms meet the needs of these computing intensive applications.




UNIX. The Complete Reference
UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition (Complete Reference Series)
ISBN: 0072263369
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 316

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