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At a time when the commercial BSD companies were fighting among themselves and allowing their technology to become stale and remain expensive, Linux came along
by dleslie 7y ago
At a time when the commercial BSD companies were fighting among themselves and allowing their technology to become stale and remain expensive, Linux came along with RedHat and SuSE.
Those two made an effort to meet directly with business leaders, attend all the trade shows, and gave their product away for free. Their model was at least as shocking as their license; hitherto, hardly any business software was free and paired with consulting services. It caused a storm, and gave birth to a whole industry that wasn't possible under the expensive BSD model.
- technofiend 7y agoEven prior to RedHat and SuSE for some reason System V-based systems were deemed more suitable to business, at least by Sun Microsystems. I stand corrected based on beef's comment below: they migrated from BSD to Sys V as part of Solaris aka SunOS V. I was misremembering their adding streams support to SunOS 4 as the big switch but I was wrong about that.
- dleslie 7y agoSun probably had a good sales team. ;)
- beefhash 7y agoSunOS 4 was still BSD-based. You can find the source code for SunOS 4.1.4 on TUHS's code comparison site[1], but for some reason, you can't browse the tree. Solaris was when Sun made the jump to System V. AFAIK part of that was because Sun had financial difficulties at the time and AT&T offered to help them -- in exchange for Sun to rebase on System V. [1] e.g. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SunOS-4.1.4/usr.bin/diff3/diff3.c https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SunOS-4.1.4/us...