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.