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Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:27 JST Scott Williams 🐧

If it weren't for lawyers being arbitrarily involved in things they shouldn't be, there's an excellent chance that we'd all be running BSD and Microsoft wouldn't have been nearly so dominant without BSD being legally sidelined in the early 90's, which gave Linux a very timely foothold, despite having to quickly reverse engineer a whole lot of what BSD long already had.

In conversation Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:27 JST from mastodon.online permalink
- Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:24 JST Scott Williams 🐧
  in reply to
  
  This effectively kept FOSS *NIX sidelined from the consumer market in the early 90s, meaning that Microsoft was left to mainly compete with other DOS based systems, which made Apple the obscure one among the many otherwise compatible offerings at HH Greg or Babbages.
  Interestingly enough, when the dust settled on the lawsuit, Microsoft themselves incorporated BSD network stack code into their emerging Windows NT platform (and even offered a POSIX subsystem for it).
  
  In conversation Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:24 JST permalink
  
  Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
- Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:25 JST Scott Williams 🐧
  in reply to
  
  It was sort of the Oracle vs Google of its day, except that Oracle vs Google didn't stop people from buying, selling, or using Android devices.
  "Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices."
  The resulting code base from the removal of those three files was the basis for FreeBSD and NetBSD (and OpenBSD, etc., later by extension).
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Software_Distribution
  In conversation Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:34:25 JST permalink
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  1. History of the Berkeley Software Distribution
    
    The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify and extend Unix. The operating system arrived at Berkeley in 1974, at the request of computer science professor Bob Fabry who had been on the program committee for the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles where Unix was first presented. A PDP-11/45 was bought to run the system, but for budgetary reasons, this machine was shared with the mathematics and statistics groups at Berkeley, who used RSTS, so that Unix only ran on the machine eight hours per day (sometimes during the day, sometimes during the night). A larger PDP-11/70 was installed at Berkeley the following year, using money from the Ingres database project.Also in 1975, Ken Thompson took a sabbatical from Bell Labs and came to Berkeley as a visiting professor. He helped to install Version 6 Unix and started working on a Pascal implementation for the system. Graduate students...
  Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
- Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:36:40 JST Scott Williams 🐧
  in reply to
  
  AT&T's own litigiousness helped make Unix obscure for the biggest emerging market for the time and instead helped Microsoft gain significant market ground on their own turf. It's not that Unix-proper is or was irrelevant, but it went from being ubiquitous to niche due to the missed or squandered opportunities, which led to the rise of Linux as the major alternative.
  
  In conversation Tuesday, 24-Jan-2023 02:36:40 JST permalink

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