Are the BSDs dying?

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a quick google search making clear that this isn't really new, and if we look at our bsd Forum we see that its the only operation systems forum with the last comment dated to June last year, whereas all the others have more recent comments.
One comment dated to 2014 is exactly what I think of this issue:

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Beside windows, there will be only linux in a near future.:b:

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Hi,

Whilst there's no question that Linux is the dominant OS in the UNIX(ish) family, I don't personally think that the BSDs are going to go away any time soon.

For example, looking at OpenBSD, there has been some ongoing native innovation happening there. They've implemented their own Web and mail servers for instance, and also have recently added a replacement for sudo . Some of that work has also been cross-ported to FreeBSD. And all of this has happened within just the last few years. Now, the question of whether doing such things is worthwhile is a separate issue and an exercise left for the reader, but nevertheles there are things happening in the BSD world that don't have anything to do with Linux, and which are happening entirely under their own momentum.

Likewise, don't count out the commercial UNIXes just yet. Oracle just yesterday released the first beta of Solaris 11.4, and have committed to provding extended support for Solaris 11.x until 2034. I've not really got any involvement with the AIX or HP-UX worlds at all myself, but I'd again be surprised if these OS's up and die any year soon. There's just too much to be gained from some very lucrative (and very locked-in) customers for them to pull the plug on their in-house UNIXes any decade soon.

And to play the real Devil's Advocate here, don't forget the most popular UNIX distros in the world in terms of number of installations and sites: iOS and macOS. OK, my tongue is definitely a bit in my cheek as I type this, and the user interface and use-case design targets for these are wildly different from anything in the "proper" UNIX/server world, but there's no denying that they are genuine proper all-in-caps-trademark UNIX systems, and again show no signs of disappearing in anything like the near future.

So whilst there's no doubt that Linux is the de facto winner of the UNIX-a-like OS wars, and ultimately almost all new deployments taking place will be on Linux and not the BSDs or any proprietary UNIX, the other survivors will continue to do quite nicely in their own little niches for a long time to come, I think.

And who knows what the future has in store ? In the early 1990s there weren't many people predicting that the established big boys (Sun in particular) would meet the fates that the ultimately did. All things must pass, and in the end Linux too will be replaced by something else that we can't currently see or imagine.

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macos certainly, but ios? It took years for it to even become multitasking. I don't think it's an implementation of UNIX.

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Hi,

Functionally-speaking, you're absolutely correct of course - you couldn't with a straight face call an iPad a UNIX workstation. But kernel-wise at least I believe iOS is UNIX underneath, as it runs a variant of the same Darwin/XNU kernel that macOS uses. So very strictly/technically/legally speaking, I believe iOS still counts as UNIX, but not in any actually useful real-world sense, no.

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little niches, thats the point. OK Solaris will run some legacy code for a while, and I guess some managers still remember the happy days at a VAX running encumbered BSD. However they are already old and all the BSD heroes like McKusick, Bostic, etc.. are even older too. BSD without them?

Has it ever been wildly popular? It's been influential but that's not the same thing.

Much of that influence is from the BSD license. You can take anything you want, if you attribute (or, apparently, even when you don't.) Bits and pieces of it have ended up in everything.

I suspect it will remain what it's always been: A "reference implementation" for a standard system and kernel which you can build your own products out of.

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There is nothing "dead" about BSD. BSD lives in the heart and soul of MacOS, and MacOS is a very popular computer operating system. All software changes over time, and BSD is no exception and BSD changed the heart of the MacOS forever:

Reference:

BSD Overview

see the BSD of the late 70ths/80ths has a lot more to do with *NIX as we know it today than AT&T who adopted a lot from BSD for System III and V. TCP,Internet, virtual memory, video terminal, vi/ex, reliable signals, job control and even printer queues, just to name a few, are all genuine BSD inventions.

That other open UNIX and UNIX-like systems became numerous is hardly a "failure" on BSD's part. That you can use any OS you like, even ones not descended from BSD, and get the same features and calls, that source will work on wildly different processors, that it no longer matters where a feature was invented -- that was the whole point. That's their true and enduring success.

Also, you're thinking of this commercially, with emphasis on customers... You don't need to be popular to contribute useful ideas. Just look at "Plan Nine". Useful ideas are still being quietly taken from BSD here and there, now and again.

I have zero experience with BSD(s), but i've heard all the praises for their network stack.
Haven't tested it in real world, and development in linux is moving light speed so perhaps it is not the case anymore.

The victory of linux over unix(es) is perhaps a victory for consumers having cheap (free) operating system, but i do not see it as a good thing for IT in general.

Domination of one product and philosophy, regardless if it's open and free is still a bad thing.

As my older colleagues say, system admins will remember the good old days where servers were made to last, programs coded with care and implemented per standards.

Regards
Peasant.

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