
Dueling Unixes and the Unix Wars [pdf] - omnibrain
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_17_salus.pdf
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SwellJoe
Whenever I think back on this era in computing history, I think it's almost
miraculous that I get to work on a UNIX(ish) system (Linux). The incredible
hubris of so many of the companies involved in UNIX back then, and the greedy
grasping over scraps, rather than focusing on growing the market and
interoperability, is astonishing. Sure, they eventually recognized the massive
failure and founded some things with "Open" in the name, to at least present
the illusion of "getting it". But, the reality is that it took actual Open
Source to save UNIX from being yet another also-ran system. And, it almost
seems like an accident of history that we have Linux (I mean, what if Linus
hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if
several others hadn't started sending patches?).

I also occasionally wonder what has been lost to similar accidents of history.
I know there are folks out there who considered UNIX inferior to VMS, for
example. What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX
was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source
version? Would we be using "Livax" today?

~~~
smhenderson
_I mean, what if Linus hadn 't posted what he did when he did about his little
"toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches?_

I know what you mean but I think we have to remember that this was when BSD
was being hit up with legal threats from AT&T that eventually went nowhere and
the GNU folks were quite busy.

I know HURD is considered the Duke Nukem of kernels now but I have to imagine
that if not for Linus we'd either be using BSD a lot more than we do or that
GNU or some other hypothetical player would have implemented a free kernel to
run GNU on top of.

But you're right on, it's amazing anyone made any progress on Unix during the
Dark Ages described in the article...

~~~
yuhong
On the other hand, there is a reason why SCO targeted Linux instead of BSD
later on.

