The term "open systems" used to mean something and used to be a +ve for UNIX but now that the key standards and interfaces are supported under NT it doesn't matter; NT is open. In fact you can now get the entire SVR4 interface under NT ; ie. AT&T Research, David Korn's UWIN project.
Buying Sun iron means I'm locked into Sun and a half-dozen or so 3rd party hardware providers. Chances are that means I'll be paying more for my hardware (less competition). If I choose X86 I'm buying into a larger market with thousands of 3rd party providers that are constantly competing providing rapid product evolution and a competitive price. The other benefit is I can now select the operating system that best runs my application(s) NT, SCO, Linux, QNX, BeOS, ... I'm not locked into one vendor.
More on open systems...
Also the "Open Systems" standards such as POSIX and the SVR4 are quite archaic once you look at the Win32 system API's; they were conceived back in the 70's. For the techies an example of the boneheaded SVR4 API called "select()" forces the application developer to wait for i/o, then loop through all descriptors to see if something happened. In Win32 you register and handler and it's done or perform a WaitMultipleObjects()... I could start talking about how screwed up signals (signal() and friends) are under UNIX ... especially if you use threads. Try seeing how OPEN UNIX is when you try to port a threaded application between AIX,HP-UX,DEC or Solaris; believe me I've done it more than once ! Solaris has the two-level model, AIX has the one level model blah blah blah, and by the time your done fixing timing and sync issues you could have re-written the entire thing.
...starting to rant
Any UNIX vendor claiming "Open Systems" as a marketing point now is scrapping the bottom of the barrel. |
