27 Aug
2019
27 Aug
'19
3:25 a.m.
Hello!
having run both FreeBSD and NetBSD and several different examples of
Linux, I found that FreeBSD was a bit flaky at the time. NetBSD was
good, but for my efforts, I ended up with Slackware, I started with
his three something examples, and now I have 11 running.
I have tried under SIMH most of the examples that live on the FTP site
which will boot. But I still have strong support for practically
everything SUN wrote.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 8:49 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 7:28 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
BSD was in decent enough shape at the time to run on PCs. Though it fragmented early
through no fault of Linux. And the AT&T lawsuit created a lot of FUD in the area
without actually protecting System V. It's unclear if another thing would have popped
up to fill the void... Linux flourished in the confusion, but without it, it's hard
to know if something else would have been developed before the AT&T lawsuit settled.
But what really allowed Linux to take off the AT&T vs. UCB/BSDi lawsuit. At the time
Linux, didn't have networking much less a window manager etc... so lot of people,
mysef included (incorrectly thinking is was a copyright case) thought we were going to
lose a UNIX for our inexpensice (i.e. 'cheap' 386 based systems) so we all
started started to hack on Linux 0.99xxx [my first real serious taste was an early
Slackware version on a billion floppies fairly soon after Linus made it available and
Patrick pulled together his first distribution].
But ... (and as I have point out elsewhere - see
http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/la-recherche-sur-les-systemes-des-pivots-d…]
.... if AT&T had won the case, all the other UNIX flavors (Linux included would have
had to have been pulled from the market).
So in many ways, this question is not really a fair one.
AT&T lost the case, and Linux got the ball and ran for it.
That said, I'll drop into the hypotheical, if AT&T had lost and Linux had not
been there ..... then... I do think some flavor of BSD would have been the winner. The
two wild cards are from Sun and OSF/CMU. As Larry says is what about SunOS and Solaris,
although the legals of Sun doing that I wonder. The other question is Mach/OSF (I know
Larry does not like the codebase).
But one of the *BSD, Mach or an FOSS Sun code base would have had the most legs.
Clem