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That line pulled me up short too. What an interesting analyses of the scene. I always got the impression Linux was looked down on early on (learned about Linux

by i336_ 10y ago

That line pulled me up short too. What an interesting analyses of the scene. I always got the impression Linux was looked down on early on (learned about Linux very late), and there you go.

digi_owl 10y ago
From what I have seen around the net, the (ex-)Sun people are still salty about the outcome. Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX.
- yellowapple 10y ago
  "Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX." Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix). It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost). I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    Linux was also Free. It's hard to beat Free of acceptable quality - the kids would install it to check it out, see that it's cool, then leave high school ready to be Linux sysadmin interns. In contrast, they might get a few minutes per week of mainframe time in University.
tyingq 10y ago
Linux was, at the time, a bit flaky and lower performing than the various enterprisey UNIX flavors. X86 servers had similar catching up to do as well.

by i336_ 10y ago

That line pulled me up short too. What an interesting analyses of the scene. I always got the impression Linux was looked down on early on (learned about Linux very late), and there you go.

digi_owl 10y ago

From what I have seen around the net, the (ex-)Sun people are still salty about the outcome. Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX.

yellowapple 10y ago
"Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX." Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix). It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost). I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Linux was also Free. It's hard to beat Free of acceptable quality - the kids would install it to check it out, see that it's cool, then leave high school ready to be Linux sysadmin interns. In contrast, they might get a few minutes per week of mainframe time in University.

tyingq 10y ago

Linux was, at the time, a bit flaky and lower performing than the various enterprisey UNIX flavors. X86 servers had similar catching up to do as well.