Originally posted by Hugh
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Oracle Reaffirms Supporting Solaris 11 Through Part Of The Next Decade
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Originally posted by johnc View Post
Man some of you people aren't capable of being honest. Sun, like Apple today, wasn't about selling operating systems. They were a hardware company. Sun got beat by Intel's x86. It was cheaper and faster. Linux simply made it possible to run a Unix-like OS on x86. That's why all those companies moved to Linux, because they moved to x86. Nobody was running Linux on SPARC or buying Sun hardware and installing Linux on it.
By the late 1990s, Linux was the good enough for many things and was much cheaper than UNIX. LINUX got better faster than UNIX and eventually overtook it.
But no, UNIX was available for x86. Before LINUX. In a number of flavours. Off the top of my head: Interactive, SCO (two flavours), and several System V release 4 ports (Solaris, ESIX, Dell Unix, Consensys, for example).
For Sun, Solaris was about adding value to bring customers into their hardware domain and keep them there (like OS X today). But with IBM dominating the high-end and Intel scooping up the low-end, and with the dot-com bubble popping, Sun's hardware market pretty much evaporated overnight.
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Originally posted by Hugh View Post
That's actually quite wrong. It's mixing up different eras.
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Originally posted by Hugh View Post
If you invent a new term ("new UNIX wars"), you better define it so that I know what the heck you are talking about.
Since you are talking about Linux, the term seems inaccurate.
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Originally posted by Volta View Post
Microsoft's license seemed odd since, as far as I know, they didn't pay any UNIX royalties previously. (Let's ignore the long-past days when they created XENIX and paid royalties to ATT.)
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Originally posted by Volta View Post
Linux vs Unix wars. Better? I would expect such nitpicking from someone else, but ok.
Nothing else felt like a war. Perhaps an insurgency.
Linux eroded all the UNIX vendor's businesses. But most had already become spent forces by the time Linux mattered.
DEC, the pioneer of minicomputers, and the builder of the PDP-7, -11, and VAX, upon which UNIX was forged, had been bought by a PC manufacturer (Compaq)! Low-end UNIX was crushed by the promise of OS/2 (even if it never delivered), and then Windows NT. The promise/threat of Itanium caused most RISC chip vendors to fold their chip-making endeavors (MIPS/SGI, HP, Compaq) and license Itanium. By the time of the Pentium, the performance advantage of bespoke RISC kind of evaporated . Even Intel was dismayed by this outcome.
The last UNIX vendors standing were IBM and Sun. IBM backed Linux, AIX, Windows NT, and their proprietary OSes. Sun only had UNIX. Linux ate their lunch (the dot com bubble already severely destabilized them -- kind of like coming off cocaine). It seemed like a route. (Me? I switched from Sun to Linux about 1997, long before Sun was hurting.)
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