The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, including FreeBSD from their cloud platform.

On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 05:27:40PM +0200, Josh Good wrote: Microsoft's milk. And the real joke is that they haven't done any serious work so far as I can tell. The original SCO sucked and then they release SVr<something> but so far as I know, there wasn't a decent development team. When I was doing the TCP/IP port I worked with Jeff Radik a bunch but I never got the sense there were big projects at SCO, it was mostly out sourcing. That was a long time ago so who knows.

All I know is that Sun did orders of magnitude more work to the kernel, libraries, at the rest of user space.

I never got the sense there were big projects at SCO, it was mostly out sourcing. That was a long time ago so who knows.

On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to milk.

-- Josh Good

Which isn't how I remember things. From what I remember, Linux had the impetus in the late nineties that FreeBSD didn't have - the *BSD were still recovering from the AT&T case, which is why O'Reilly had to issue a 4.4BSD-Lite Cd-ROM when I suspect, they would've preferred to have issued a 4.4BSD complete disc. So from IBM's POV, they could support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?

At any rate, by the time IBM formally joined the Linux club, it was already (unofficial) host to at least one unofficial port to one of its historic mainframes, and official host to an officlal SkunkWorks port to its then-current mainframes. Experience counts. None of the *BSD had nearly as big a presence in the IBM world, and none of the earlier IBM Unix ports, some 4.*BSD, as far as I can remember, ever had the presence of Linux as both a platform and - thanks to Caldera-later-aka-The Sco Group - as a cause.

I had hoped that Xinuos was an honest attempt to provide support for remaining SCO sites, but it seems they've fallen to the Dark Side and the Easy Buck again. Sic transit gloria mundi ...

Wesley Parish On 4/2/21, Warner Losh &lt;imp(a)bsdimp.com&gt; wrote: lawsuit. SCO's and of goes to

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish &lt;wobblygong(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously.

The first version of AIX for the IBM RT PC was developed by INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. under contract to IBM. The second version of AIX was developed by Locus Computing. Some brief history can be found here: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#IBM_RT_PC Heinz

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish &lt;wobblygong(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously. A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the IBM side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold on the education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of the lack of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more and more focused on the commercial sector where there was much more money to be made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM educational/research team to be able to reenter that market and Locus was hired to develop AIX/370 (and later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX was considered an important offering for those customers. After it was released as a product, it turned out purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly difficult (for a number of reasons), although it was extremely well received by those that ran it, but getting it was difficult. In fact, I have been told by folks that there at the time, that using TCF was an important feature here at Intel for the success of the simulation for the 486 and Pentium. Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for the RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin (no TCF, but supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was actually contracted to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but I'm not sure if that ever shipped. I had left Locus and had gone to DEC by then.

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish &lt;wobblygong(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This is not how I remember it going down. There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine Associates. They're still around.) I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer from Oracle in its back pocket. But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned out differently. Adam

I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting its focus from engineering and research to sales?

Why does it no longer occupy the premier place it once did?

Note: These are my opinions/experiences not necessarily those of the association or my employer. And, yes, I am a former BOD member as well as ex-President of same, as are a number of folks on this list. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 1:30 AM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic and research-oriented and less 'trade show.' The key is that USENIX and ALS should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the personalities involved were at odds with each other. IMO: it was more of a crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on the PC for that specific conference. Ted may have been on the BOD at the same time. As they say on Quora, "*never ask a question based on a false premise*." Sadly, this is a false statement. USENIX is extremely well respected in the systems research and security community in particular. And even during these Covid times has continued to have some of the premier conferences on the same; al biet virtual (more in a minute). An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. USENIX had moved from its earlier (anything goes) - pure practitioner origins - which were also researchers, so at a meeting in a classroom at NYU, you told people you had something to say and came and did it, to a more structured (research) approach with program committees, submitted papers, and vetting and a hotel. Along the way, because it had both types of people and these were the folks that influenced the buying patterns, vendors started to show up to show off what they had. At the time of the ALS conference you mentioned, the things happening in the FOSS community - was much more like the origins of USENIX. What had for years separated USENIX from IEEE/ACM was it was where the two foci were really a single one, and thus had been together and actually considered what was potential as well as practical. In fact, USENIX was noted as the place where some of the most influential papers of the time had shown (numerous storage papers including Rusty's NFS and my EFS paper in the same session, just about any important security papers, numerous other system papers -- I could go a few pages here). Part of the issue was ACM's SOSP was every 2 years and there was too much good stuff going on in the system world (BTW - USENIX eventually created OSDI on alternate years because ACM was just going to do it). But USENIX also published less formal papers. In fact, one of my all-time favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this list -- Tom Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer USENIX [which if you have never read, send me an email, offline and I'll send you a scanned PDF -- note to Tom if you still have the original bits I bet USENIX would like them]. I suspect that such a paper would never have been acceptable in any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Also unlike ACM/IEEE (and frankly the thing that happen at USENIX when I was President that I am most proud of) is that they do not have a paywall. Anything they published from the time when all proceedings were electronic is available and slowly some of the older papers are being scanned or reprinted from the source - as needed/possible. As much as possible, all of USENIX's papers <https://www.usenix.org/publications/proceedings> are available to anyone [which was a huge thing to do - as it cut down a lot of revenue for them -- a paywall for papers is one of the things other associations use]. A number of good things happened at the time you mentioned, as well as some bad. Knowing the parties involved both today and at that time, if today's BOD and Executive Director was given the same choices that they had at the time of the action, I suspect we might have had a different outcome. IMO to the demise of FREENIX and ALS were two of the not-so-good choices that were made, but I understand why those conferences did go away at that point in history. If it makes you feel any better, as a former PC Chair for a couple of FREENIX (which was caught with the same bullet), and as I said a member of the PC of ALS, I was very sad to see that happen and I personally fought against it. But, I was on the losing side of that argument. Unfortunately, that ship sailed, and reviving them is unlikely to be possible although I believe it has been discussed a number of times since I left the BOD. Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to many practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I do find sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that might be so. For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart, and I were all talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers conferences a few years back. So, if you come from that side of the world, you may not value membership or the results (BTW: my own now hacker daughter, who is a Googler, dropped her membership last year as she felt it was of less value to her); but so far USENIX has continued to be important to a large part of the research community and a set of some practitioners. That said, I also believe in 2021, that the USENIX BOD and their ED is struggling with a financial model that works for them when they do not have the conference revenue as they had before CV-19. I hope for their sake, the current treading water situation can find a way to bring them back to what they were pre-CV-19 because the conferences they traditionally have held, are excellent (premier in your words) and I would hate to see that really go away because they have had a lot of value and so far have continued to provide it. Respectfully -- my 2 cents. Clem

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at conferences. There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read academic papers, ummm, very selectively. (In particular, anything labeled "formal semantics" just gets skipped.)

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. --"The Pyre of Denethor"

The paper was rejected by the program committee, on the objection that "ports aren't research". So the pro-academic, anti-engineering mindset was already in place back then.

On Apr 5, 2021, at 4:34 PM, Richard Salz &lt;rich.salz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No fair including one of your own on the list :)

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 2:08 PM John Gilmore &lt;gnu(a)toad.com&gt; wrote: IMHO, USENIX walked away from a group that they should have been trying to cultivate.

On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 01:39:54PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: FAST reviews are blind. ATC conferences are (as of the last time I was on an ATC PC a year or two ago) are still not blinded.

I'm an engineer, not an academic. [...] The paper was rejected by the program committee, on the objection that "ports aren't research".

Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic and research-oriented and less 'trade show.' The key is that USENIX and ALS should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the personalities involved were at odds with each other. IMO: it was more of a crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on the PC for that specific conference. Ted may have been on the BOD at the same time.

But USENIX also published less formal papers. In fact, one of my all-time favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this list -- Tom Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer USENIX [which if you have never read, send me an email, offline and I'll send you a scanned PDF -- note to Tom if you still have the original bits I bet USENIX would like them]. I suspect that such a paper would never have been acceptable in any of the IEEE or ACM conferences.

Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to many practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I do find sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that might be so. For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart, and I were all talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers conferences a few years back. So, if you come from that side of the world, you may not value membership or the results (BTW: my own now hacker daughter, who is a Googler, dropped her membership last year as she felt it was of less value to her); but so far USENIX has continued to be important to a large part of the research community and a set of some practitioners.

> Misremembered the year. That conference was October 2000. I just > found the bookbag I got as swag from it.

I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I was at the

I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I was at the

Hello! Adam? Seriously? That was the case when I visited them at one year's LinuxWorld. (I think it was the one when we met.) And yes at the System Z Council meetings I would catch up with them. Larry? It is funny, but earlier on I did mention all of that in a completely different thread. But why would the <DELETED!> characters at what was SCO start this stupidity all over again? I seem to be missing something. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 10:48 PM Adam Thornton &lt;athornton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: wrote: IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine Associates. They're still around.) had bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer from Oracle in its back pocket. the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned out differently.

Reverse that, and with some squinting, you get something that sounds like “Sue ‘nix”. Perhaps it’s a long running joke after all?

Steve Nickolas &lt;usotsuki(a)buric.co&gt; wrote: This there already is. They're in the TUHS archives. Arnold

Steve Nickolas &lt;usotsuki(a)buric.co&gt; wrote: The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect, it's too late anyway.

A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to 4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like painting a bullseye on myself.

"It's out there" isn't good enough. SunOS 4 is "out there" - nobody in their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks!

SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work).

On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits were in charge instead of the real workers.

On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits were in charge instead of the real workers.

On 3 Apr 2021, at 12:51, Dave Horsfall &lt;dave(a)horsfall.org&gt; wrote:

SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades);

all these years later, the best part of my career was at Sun. Sun was the Bell Labs of my generation.

On 2021 Apr 3, 19:23, Larry McVoy wrote: Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a game of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite game: attracting users and developers with features, openness and by providing a more joyful user/developer experience. Those who could, used Sun kit. Those not so fortunate, aspired to use it.

Josh Good

On 5 Apr 2021, at 02:15, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote:

IBM lost the Research/Universities to DEC which started out being very open and easy to work with and extremely cost-effective. As more $s piled in the market, DEC started to be more and more protective (and moved more and more upscale). To many at the time, DEC compared to IBM (Mainframe S/360 vs. PDP-6/9/10) again -- worse technology, but 'good enough' (and a new growing customer base). The Unix Workstations come out - again 68K vs. Vax (story repeats). Sun eventually taking the lead from DEC. As Larry points out, Sun certainly started being extremely friendly to the same group -- again cost-effective and leading tech. Sun went upscale and the Intel/Microsoft alliance was good enough to a lot of people.

For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.”

Instead of “access methods” of the 60s we have frameworks.  We lost simplicity, clarity, and direct access for dancing colors on the LCD and a GUI.  Yes they sell a lot of devices but I’m not sure we are better off.  

On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold &lt;davida(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same. Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools.

On Apr 4, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah &lt;bakul(a)iitbombay.org&gt; wrote: Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. Many things are easier to convey visually. It would be neat if unix paradigms can be extended to visual design as well. And you certainly can't do visual design easily in vi/emacs. Just like in Autocad you need both interactivity and programmability for creating visual elements. I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, *etc*." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden rule. IMHO a bigger need is some discipline on storage. As things stand, it is hard to extract data from applications for legitimate uses but not so hard to extract for illegitimate uses. If app A for some specific domain dies, there is no guarantee that app B for the same domain can use A's data. What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can use it too. Similar conditions existed and exist to a certain extent in research orgs of some companies but I think that is a necessary condition, not sufficient. The right research crew can bring in another kind of interactivity -- in creativity, in trying out and critiquing each others' ideas and building on them. And you still need the right key people. Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 *vs.* VMS *vs.* winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible ( *i.e.* be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well).

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah &lt;bakul(a)iitbombay.org&gt; wrote: Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, etc." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden rule. What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can use it too. Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 vs. VMS vs. winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible (i.e. be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well).

Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a game of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite game: attracting users and developers with features, openness and by providing a more joyful user/developer experience.

Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris.

Clem Cole writes: I'm sure it predated Solaris (SunOS 5). My few remaining brain cells from that era say "4.1."

Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris.

Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) writes: Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris.

On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun (running SunOS). Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)". I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't build anywhere else. The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the dominant mindshare. - Ted

On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote: licence the a This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could to make it unambiguous what I meant. A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a court of law).