[GTALUG] ​Can the Internet exist without Linux? | ZDNet

Alvin Starr alvin at netvel.net
Wed Jan 13 09:47:34 UTC 2016


If I remember correctly BSDI was selling their variant until long after 
linux caught on.
Remember the first distributions showed up in 1992 and we were building 
some small in house systems based on SLS and Yggdrasil at Siemens around 
that time.

I could never prove it but my belief is that BSDI would have continued 
to sell their Unix if it were not for Linux.
Bill Jolitz may have taken a run at a free system with his bsd variant 
but its not clear what would have happened with the various law suits 
floating around at that time.when we did some business with him a few 
years before he was very sensitive to the AT&T lawyers and was careful 
to insure source code did not leak out.

I doubt that an established company would have brought out a free 
operating system just because the conventional wisdom was and still is 
that you need to protect your intellectual property and giving it away 
is madness.

Almost all the original free software came from individuals or very 
small groups.
I would bet that if Linus Torvalds knew how big linux were to become he 
would have licensed it some how.





On 01/13/2016 01:12 AM, John Sellens wrote:
> On Wed, 2016/01/13 12:23:52AM -0500, Alvin Starr <alvin at netvel.net> wrote:
> | The problem that the early BSD variants faced was AT&T licensing.
> | If there was only BSD around it may have stayed closed for a long time
> | even to today.
> |
> | Eventually linux developed enough of a following that the value for
> | AT&T,SCO,Microsoft et al had no real value in trying to hold on to the
> | rights.
>
> I don't think that's a reasonable interpreation of the history.  BSDI and
> AT&T settled in 1994, at which point I think it was fair to say that
> proprietary UNIX still had significant value.  (Sun machines with Solaris
> were a huge part of the internet insfrastructure until the early 2000's -
> or later.)
>
>      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Design
>
>
> My personal opinion is that if linux didn't exist, FreeBSD would likely be
> dominant, and that things would be very similar to what we currently have.
>
>
> Cheers!
>
> John
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