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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 09:47:34AM -0500, Alvin Starr wrote:
> 
> 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.

Certainly in the mid to late 90s there used to be a system for linux to
allow executing BSDi binaries.  These days it would be much more likely
for people to want BSD to be able to execute linux binaries.  But back
then commercial software was compiled for BSDi, not linux.

-- 
Len Sorensen