Annual Shipments (Units) | Annual Fee (US$) |
Up to 1,000 | $25,000 |
1,000 to 30,000 | $50,000 |
more than 30,000 | $110,000 |
And some of those customers continue to use AIX and HP-UX and Solaris.
Before FreeBSD or GNU/Linux became widely available, AIX was my favorite Unix. I never got to work with HP-UX or Solaris, but we hustled a lot of SCO/Openserver 5 licenses to our clients, which brings me no great pride. Xenix never passed muster in our software department. FreeBSD now naturally beats the AIX of way-back-then, but I'm sure the AIX of today is probably greatly improved. The 1-800 support line is great if one can afford it.It's tricky. For real customers who matter financially (the ones who put a lot of effort into evaluating what software they buy), the tradeoff between something like AIX, HP-UX and Solaris (all real Unixes in the sense of containing the original AT&T source code) one one side, and Linux or *BSD on the other side depends on a lot of things; it does not depend on the trademarked name "Unix". They know full well how compatible or incompatible Linux and *BSD are.
And some of those customers continue to use AIX and HP-UX and Solaris. They have really good reasons for that. Those versions tend to be heavily debugged, very well quality controlled, they work perfectly on serious big-iron machines, and they have extremely good support. If you are a multi-million $ customer of IBM, HP or Oracle, and your expensive "Unix" machine crashes, you dial an 800 number, and someone will help you right away. That's something that you can't do with *BSD, and only to a little extent with Linux (RedHat and SUSE have support, but it is nowhere near that level).
If FreeBSD wanted to enter that market and compete, then it might want to get the Unix certification. I find that very unlikely.
Only one Linux distribution has obtained a UNIX cert and that was just a couple of years ago. It's a custom version that, iirc, is also proprietary for one specific super computer and cannot be downloaded, though that I'm not sure of.what some Linux distributions have done.
All of this makes me wonder why Apple originally obtained UNIX certification for Mac OS X, and makes me wonder further why they still continue to do so.