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> Given all that, a legally unambiguous BSD almost certainly would have wound up being eaten by Microsoft rather than AT&T and the UNIX Wars. All the anger from

> Given all that, a legally unambiguous BSD almost certainly would have wound up being eaten by Microsoft rather than AT&T and the UNIX Wars. All the anger from early 2000s Microsoft about Linux was solely because the GPL prevented them from just writing a better version of Linux or GNU that other people couldn't have. Microsoft was very good at taking open standards and extending them with the goal of making their implementation replace the standard. The GPL copyleft was the perfect thorn in the foot of a Microsoft that liked to cheat the norms of standards bodies. This is a strange counterfactual to propose, given that Microsoft at one time sold the most installed Unix on the market: Xenix. Which it later abandoned. Given that they were licensing System 7 from AT&T, why would a tweak to BSD licensing result in them "eating" it?

pjmlp 3y ago
Sometimes I wonder how much they repent themselves of having sold Xenix, and later on not holding on to a better POSIX support on NT, having to ship a Linux VM in the end. I for one only bothered with Linux initially after having learned UNIX on Xenix at the technical school, and using DG/UX on university campus, because POSIX support on Windows NT was so flanky, and later on it was more practical to deal with dual boot than SUA.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Microsoft's biggest existential risk in the 80s was not having a "real OS"[0]. They had DOS, which they bought from SCP[1] to fix a problem IBM was having, and they had XENIX, which they had to license from AT&T. DOS was technically unsound - it almost sort of worked for personal computing but nobody was going to build workstations out of IBM PCs running DOS. They wanted to build a "real OS" on top of XENIX, going as far as to add porting aids between DOS 2 and XENIX in what they dubbed "XEDOS". Then Bell Labs started selling System V directly in 1983 and Microsoft chickened out of UNIX. In this environment, Microsoft wound up writing several attempts at home-grown "real OS" projects: Multitasking DOS 4, and ADOS, which then became OS/2. None of these succeeded. OS/2 got close, but Microsoft really didn't like working with IBM, and Windows 3[2] was selling way better. Microsoft ultimately got itself out of this dilemma with NT and Windows 95, both of which used a slightly modified Win32 API that was "real OS" compatible. However, that was almost a decade during which any number of companies could have easily upended, if not killed the company. BSD didn't start separating itself from AT&T owned code until 1989. Had they done so earlier, Microsoft could have pivoted to a BSD-based XENIX and saved themselves the cost of an AT&T license (which drastically increased with SysV). Microsoft could have shipped Windows on top of that instead of, say, the hackery that was WIN-OS/2 or waiting for Dave Cutler to design and build NT. [0] Virtual memory, apps run in protected mode ring 3, and preemptive multitasking. [1] Seattle Computer Products, not the SCP Foundation [2] Which is not a "real OS" in the sense that it's technically near identical to the Macintosh's system software.

pjmlp 3y ago

Sometimes I wonder how much they repent themselves of having sold Xenix, and later on not holding on to a better POSIX support on NT, having to ship a Linux VM in the end. I for one only bothered with Linux initially after having learned UNIX on Xenix at the technical school, and using DG/UX on university campus, because POSIX support on Windows NT was so flanky, and later on it was more practical to deal with dual boot than SUA.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Microsoft's biggest existential risk in the 80s was not having a "real OS"[0]. They had DOS, which they bought from SCP[1] to fix a problem IBM was having, and they had XENIX, which they had to license from AT&T. DOS was technically unsound - it almost sort of worked for personal computing but nobody was going to build workstations out of IBM PCs running DOS. They wanted to build a "real OS" on top of XENIX, going as far as to add porting aids between DOS 2 and XENIX in what they dubbed "XEDOS". Then Bell Labs started selling System V directly in 1983 and Microsoft chickened out of UNIX. In this environment, Microsoft wound up writing several attempts at home-grown "real OS" projects: Multitasking DOS 4, and ADOS, which then became OS/2. None of these succeeded. OS/2 got close, but Microsoft really didn't like working with IBM, and Windows 3[2] was selling way better. Microsoft ultimately got itself out of this dilemma with NT and Windows 95, both of which used a slightly modified Win32 API that was "real OS" compatible. However, that was almost a decade during which any number of companies could have easily upended, if not killed the company. BSD didn't start separating itself from AT&T owned code until 1989. Had they done so earlier, Microsoft could have pivoted to a BSD-based XENIX and saved themselves the cost of an AT&T license (which drastically increased with SysV). Microsoft could have shipped Windows on top of that instead of, say, the hackery that was WIN-OS/2 or waiting for Dave Cutler to design and build NT. [0] Virtual memory, apps run in protected mode ring 3, and preemptive multitasking. [1] Seattle Computer Products, not the SCP Foundation [2] Which is not a "real OS" in the sense that it's technically near identical to the Macintosh's system software.