| > and also a noteworthy mention was the fact the BSDs were basically sabotaged by AT&T via their nefarious set of lawsuits, which nipped in the bud any semblance of advantage they had People keep saying that but I saw zero evidence of those lawsuits factoring into any purchasing decisions that customers made. I saw Solaris SPARK servers purchased for running Informix RDBMS I saw Solaris deployed for payroll systems running Oracle middleware. I saw FreeBSD servers built for web hosting I saw FreeBSD servers built for ISP backend services But at no point in the 90s did I see anyone running Linux commercially. In fact the only reason I ran Linux (Slackware) in the 90s was to see what all the fuss was about from my nerdy younger peers on IRC. And even then, I just threw it on a desktop PC. In the 90s you had NextStep workstations used to build games intended for PCs (like Id Software did with Doom and Quake). And used at CERN for the development of the WWW. UNIX was the 90s platform of choice for computer animation. It was the platform of choice for multi-tenant web hosting. And so on and so forth. Much as Linux had the cool hacker community, 90s UNIX systems had superior ACLs, containerisation, faster TCP/IP stacks, significantly more stable file system drivers and so on and so forth. So people naturally chose UNIX for their important systems. And that’s exactly the trend I personally experienced in the 90s. This isn’t to say that I think the unix wars had “zero effect” on the decline of unix, but I do personally think the amount of impact it had is massively overestimated. I think Linux would have taken over regardless because the Linux culture embraced everyone’s weird ideas vs UNIX systems that did extensive gatekeeping. And the kids that played with Linux because it was fun and hacking was encouraged, grew up and became influential in decision making. I think the culture of Linux had more to do with Linux’s growth than anything else. Personally, I don’t think the license made any difference here. I do get the arguments people make about GPL, but GPL was around since before Linux and it didn’t gain significant traction then. But like most of the opinions I’ve shared above, it’s an impossible point to prove either way. |