Re: Linux or GNU/Linux

If the Unix vendors didn't stupidly price themselves out of the market and if the BSDs folks didn't fall victim to IP lawyers then there would of been no need and no purpose behind the existence of Linux. If you got your nearly-free Unix system pre-installed on your PCs, then why care about even starting Linux?

On a side note:

Of course everybody should understand that Microsoft got it's start as a Unix vendor. If I have my history right Microsoft's first commercial operating system was Unix, not DOS. One major market was a popular line of point of sale devices that was used by various nation-wide chains in the USA. Companies like Blockbuster or Pizzahut used it as the OS for tracking orders and inventory. In the 386 days SCO was hired by Microsoft to develop Xenix on their behalf. Unix was also the primary development platform used by Microsoft up until Windows for Workgroups; around the early to mid 1990's. Microsoft lost interest in Unix with their work with IBM on the OS/2 effort, which was then superseded by NT.

Also Microsoft's Unix was probably was the most widespread Unix version of it's time. Microsoft showed significant foresight by abandoning the Unix morass and striking it out on their own. Also they managed to avoid IBM sucking them back in.

Another side note... The SCO of today is not the same SCO that hacked on Xenix and developed OpenServer. That SCO was effectively destroyed by their relationship with IBM. They threw themselves on the rocks with their attempts to collaborate with IBM over a unified Unix platform. This was a commercial failure and IBM happily used Linux as a much more viable alternative. SCO lacked the resources to recover from this fiasco and their primary platform languished as a result. As a result People migrated away from it in ever larger numbers... SCO sold off it's Unix side in 2001.

The SCO of 'sue Linux' lawsuit fame is really 'The SCO Group', which was the company previously known as Caldera. They were one of the many commercial Linux vendors that tried the 'proprietary value added features' model.. which turned out to be a fatally flawed business model.

The remaining bits of the 'real SCO' really went off to try to be a web platform company... which was bought by Sun, which is now part of Oracle... which is now using Unix and Linux as a vehicle to fight off their current greatest nemesis: Microsoft.

My conclusions on all of this is:

All in all the history and rise and fall of Unix is a miserable tragedy. There are quite a lot of other things that happened that isn't mentioned above.. like Microsoft's using legacy contracts with SCO over Xenix code to try to damage that company's ability to compete with NT, or how the now infamous BSD copyright lawsuits went down.

If it wasn't for the industry's stupid obsession with IP (and the resulting willingness to throw themselves on that sword) we would all be probably running variations of 'real' Unix systems. Likely hybrid open source/closed source systems (although most people probably wouldn't think in terms like that) with a handful of different academic and industry working groups with full access to the code sponsored by vendors to continue the develop different aspects of the platform.

I guess the state of the art for *nix systems has been held back by about 20 years or more because of all of the legal mumbo jumbo and people pursuing the 'proprietary features' and 'proprietary add on' approaches to try to garner market share and lock in customers.