I think that, once you're going that far back in history, it's pretty critical to keep track of the GNU/Linux distinction. Linus just wrote a kernel. And then the GNU userland, which had already been in development since the mid 80s, but was still somewhat lacking a workable kernel, was adopted as the official userland to use with the Linux kernel.
And at roughly the same time, IIRC, when Sun decided to migrate their Unix from a BSD flavor to a SysV flavor, which came to be called Solaris, they also used some GNU bits. Which might explain some similarities between the two.
The first Linux distribution I remember using was Slackware on floppy disks, at a time when building a kernel was pretty much necessary to get a working system. A great learning experience, all in all.
However, the point I'd like to make is that it was clear back then just how much was contributed directly by the GNU project, and also how favored GNU's GPL was by developers who wanted to contribute their work.
GNU really did seem like it was everything that made the Linux kernel act and feel like a Unix system, though I had no proper appreciation of that at the time.
Not really. Solaris is (was) from a ground up a corporate Unix environment designed to run mission critical applications. All the management interfaces and features reflected that. Zones were way ahead of the time, also pretty nice features.
Solaris is more an example of Oracle's shittiness, it was doing fine with Sun, plenty of places that still relied on it being a commercially supported unix, even when it was open sourced.
Linux is a more-open and more-pragmatic reincarnation of what MINIX was in 1991, when you couldn't redistribute MINIX source code but could only get it by buying Tanenbaum's book, and MINIX was high-church microkernel design with performance problems that Torvalds got sick of.
Illumos and friends are effectively dead, except as hobbies for enthusiasts. Sun Microsystems, now Oracle, didn't like the reception Open Solaris got so they packed up their source code and went home.
Which is really a shame.
All 'True' Unixes are just closed source versions of what originally were open source operating systems. By taking copyright seriously and having the misconception that there is intrinsic value in 'IP' they effectively sentenced their operating systems and investors to a long term grave.
But I doubt most of them feel bad about it. They got their millions and their nice fat retirements. It doesn't matter now if customers now view their once dominate systems as a sort of technical debt cancer.
If it wasn't for the destructive power that copyright has on technology and the demands of board members to monetize Unix.. we would all be using BSD right now. Unfortunately the tech people from 30 years ago didn't understand the power of 'letting go' and thus allowed them to destroy Unix.
As far as docker goes it has a lot of momentum as a daemon and it'll probably stay that way for a long time despite some technically superior solutions for running containers that have cropped up in the past few years. The newer container solutions just don't have the community backing them and that matters.
From a trademarking stance, the only 'True" unixes are those that pay to get certified by Single UNIX specification. Of those, two are commercial Linux distributions, and the rest (including macOS) are proprietary unix operating systems
Solaris’ first release was in June 1992, with first use of the name in marketing materials in September 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#His...)
Linus’ famous message was from the same time (September 17, 1991)
Calling Linux an open source version of Minix is more appropriate, but it still wouldn’t be a good example of this.
Minix isn’t dead. It moved to a BSD license, and is deployed in millions of hundreds of millions of Intel CPUs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa...)