
The Sourceware Operating System Proposal (1993) - brudgers
http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/unix/srcos.html
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luckydude
Heh, nice to see this again. If Sun had had the balls to do this perhaps
they'd still be around.

And if I had had the balls to do it with BitKeeper perhaps there would be a
bithub. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

~~~
Aloha
I thought when I read this "well, thats exactly what they did, 20 years
later..."

I get the choice you made with BitKeeper, its very hard to turn away from that
stream of semi predictable revenue, to the wild unknown, hindsight is always
20/20.

~~~
luckydude
The problem we had was no money. Sun was in a different place, they sold
hardware, the software was a tax. They could have made the software open
source and built an ecosystem around them.

There wasn't any hardware in BK. So it was a bigger stretch. I would have
_loved_ to figure out a way to do it but I didn't find a way.

~~~
Aloha
Solaris could have lived on, I'm still not quite sure about Sun, moving from
the hardware market to just software would have killed them had Oracle bought
them. I believe Vendor Lock in is what keeps Sparc alive.

As far as BK - I work on a similarly specialized software product as a hobby,
a friend of mine owns it, and I've advocated a bunch of times for open source
- in the end support contracts I think would end up being as much money as we
currently get out of licensing, with the added benefit of the ease of adding
developers, but its his baby, and he cant give it up.

