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pjmlp 5 days ago

Which ones? BSD was tied in a lawsuit that left doubts on its future.

Minix was a toy OS for university teachings.

Coherent was commercial.

Nothing else was there on the PC market.

hnlmorg 5 days ago | parent [-]

386BSD and its derivatives (eg FreeBSD) weren’t really attacked by SCO like other UNIXes were. In fact SCO filed more lawsuits against Linux than they did (for example) FreeBSD.

FreeBSD was also used heavily in the late 90s in ISPs and similar domains.

nyrikki 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you are a possibly a decade off on the timing here.

USL v. BSDi is what impacted the BSD side, and it was during that lawsuit before Novell bought USL etc.... that the problems were that allowed Linux to make gains while the net/2 distros were in a waiting game IMHO.

The timing absolutely helped Linux and GNU being packaged as a complete system by the various distros etc..., and common OSS distribution points like Walnut Creek and PHT were very much concerned about USL v. BSDi and in an era when you had to make long distance phone calls to download with a modem, a lack of CDroms etc... absolutely caused a dip in adoption of the BSDs.

By the time the IBM v. SCO lawsuits happened (2003) the UNIX wars were long gone and Linux was already established.

SCO/Interactive/Coherent/etc... and other x86ish UNIXes were quite common in my work in the early 1990s, but the whole unix wars is way to complicated to cover in a single post.

The post .com bubble SCO lawsuits really just didn't matter much, the consolidation that happened in the early 90's that ended the UNIX wars, plus Intel killing most of the commercial unix independent CPUs with Itanium untruths and impossible promises and an inability for the major vendors to adapt to a lower margin model etc... killed those off.

The SCO lawsuits were really just the flailing of a dyeing company which was the end result of WordPerfect buying Novell with Novells money and local Utah politics.

hnlmorg 5 days ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I don’t think my point was very clear. I wasn’t saying that SCO sued Linux in the 90s nor that the UNIX wars had zero impact.

Just that FreeBSD was still used a lot in the 90s and managed (at least from what I experienced) to dodge most of the concerns that companies had deploying other UNIXes.

I mean, it’s not like UNIX use dropped to zero overnight.

So you did see a lot of Internet companies using FreeBSD as their platform of choice. For a while, it really did look like FreeBSD was becoming the dominant server platform in that domain. Not everyone too Linux serious at that time. It wasn’t until at least 99 when Linux became a viable competitor to FreeBSD.

But once Linux did gain favour its popularity sky rocketed. Which is exactly why SCO took various Linux shops to court.

manithree 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nobody said SCO sued BSD or BSD users. USL sued BSD and UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....) long before the SCO lawsuits.

hnlmorg 5 days ago | parent [-]

Even in that case, it was one suit and it was settled before FreeBSD was ever released.

Which simply wasn’t enough drama to persuade businesses on smaller budgets away from using FreeBSD.

pjmlp 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Those only came to be after AT&T lawsuit was cleared, and by then Linux already had enough wind behind it.

Also SCO lawsuit was more due to IBM's money than Linux.

Both a different situation than Windows NT being available a decade earlier.

hnlmorg 5 days ago | parent [-]

You’re sidestepping my point that FreeBSD was in widespread use in the 90s.

My point about SCO wasn’t clear though. I was just saying FreeBSD wasn’t as embroiled in the UNIX wars as the others, ie referencing SCO vs Linux to demonstrate how even Linux suffered more time in the courts than FreeBSD did.

pjmlp 4 days ago | parent [-]

Not at all, except for Hotmail and Yahoo, I never saw it being used personally.

In fact, had I not bought a set of Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, I would never had used it in first place, and never again since those days, excluding derivatives like macOS and Orbis OS.

Which is why I asserted with good POSIX support, the world today probably would be Windows NT linage on the PCs, plus the commercial UNIXes everywhere else.

hnlmorg 4 days ago | parent [-]

You work for mainly Windows shops though don’t you?

My experience was very different in the 90s.

Solaris, FreeBSD and Next were very widely used. The only times I saw NT was in edu, government, and a random publishing house (which ran pirated copies of NT 4 on the servers and Mac OS 8 everywhere else).

That publisher is an interesting chapter in my career on its own actually…