On 10/30/2010 11:01 AM, joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
Erik Trimble<erik.trim...@oracle.com> wrote:
On 10/29/2010 7:04 AM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
AIX is soon dead, according to IBM executives. That is the reason there are not
too many great AIX people around.
Nah, I haven't seen any pronouncements of the death of AIX in the last
couple of years. At the minimum, it will continue on like OS/400 or the
other legacy IBM OSes (i.e. no new features, but supported for decades).
I expect AIX will still have support when I retire in 20 years.
That said, AIX admins are rare, and will become and endangered species
soon. Particularly, anyone under 40 at this time. I'd be willing to bet
that there aren't more than 100 people world-wide born after 1980 who
could actually lay claim to being a serious AIX admin.
It may be that the universe you describe exists somewhere..... The universe I
live in, however does not match your description.
Thanks to the fact that IBM aproached universities, AIX may even be in a
better long term situation than Solaris. Since at least two years, there is an
AIX course that educates AIX admins at the Freie Universität Berlin. I expect
that more than 100 students born after 1980 did attend these courses.
There was an attempt from the Freie Universität Berlin to offer such a course
with Solaris before but Sun did prevent this from happening as Sun was not
interested in giving access to the needed hardware (bigger irons) to the
students.
That's interesting. I have no contacts in Europe, the Middle East, or
Africa about this, so it's neat to see that IBM is actually forging
ahead with keeping AIX in front of people. Good for them.
Sadly (well, at least for UNIX folks), I don't see anything like that
here in the Western Hemisphere, or even in the major places in Asia I
know of (Singapore, Osaka, Seoul, or anything much in India or
Australia). I admittedly don't have much knowledge of Brazil, so that's
a major market that things might be different in. But in those place I
do know of, there doesn't seem to be much AIX push - really, only the
existing places its already in, and then only training people to service
that installed base. Which seems strange, since the places I do have
contacts and information about represent about 60% of the total world
economy. Why exactly IBM's strategy is different here vs where you are,
Jorg, I can't say. Kinda mystifying.
It's actually one of the big problems with legacy OSes - not that you
can't get support, but that there is no talent left in the marketplace
to talk to support. :-)
Although there was no sufficient support for universities by Sun, the existance
of Indiana did attract a lot of students that before did know only Linux. The
fact that Oracle stopped offering source code updates on August 18th 2010 let
many of them rethink their interest. I currently see Solaris as an endangered
species and I hope that Oracle willl rethink it's strategy before it is too
late.
Jörg
Back on topic - I think we did have this discussion a couple of month
ago, and I do strongly believe that Oracle needs to wake up and start
re-priming the younger generation with free or very-low-cost solutions
to keep them interested in Solaris. Or, it indeed will go the way of
AIX here in the US.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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