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On 05/08/2009 09:41 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: > On May 8, 2009, at 7:37 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > =20 >>> Point. But by the time period, 1990 or so, they were all heading =20 >>> out the door and were gone by 1994. Exceptions are Minix, which =20 >>> was never commercial, and QNX, which found a niche in embedded =20 >>> systems. >>> >>> =20 >> Venix was still releasing its version up through 1994. Both Linux =20 >> and FreeBSD were available in 1994. >> =20 > > Linux and FreeBSD are, like Minix, not commercial products (although =20 > there are commercial products built on them). > > The last Venix release was in 1994. Never mind that Venix was pretty = > much designed for Digital hardware (DEC PRO, Rainbow, etc). So while = > VenturCom was never a hardware vendor, Venix was still effectively a =20 > hardware lock-in. > =20 Go in today's data centers and see how big corporations use Linux. Why=20 would Red Hat and SuSE produce Enterprise verisons if it is not a=20 commercial product. If we go back in time a bit, many of the early ISPs=20 used BSD variants (such as Net BSD) because at the time it was much more = stable than Linux and had a more efficient network stack. Minix and=20 Coherent were certainly never more than personal experimental projects. = But, in the mid-1990s, while SCO did have the market share of x86 based=20 Unix (and Unix like) systems, there were other options - including Venix = that was working fine on PC hardware. Actually, my daughter worked for=20 Venturcom a few years ago when it was headquartered in Cambridge, but=20 they subsequently moved, and are now part of Citrix. It really does not=20 matter, but SCO certainly had competition throughout the 80s and 90s.=20 But, they focused heavily on the corporations by providing a good=20 support network. I was with a company that did use Venix on their PCs,=20 and another that did use SCO, and I actually ran a copy of SCO=20 (installed from diskettes :-) at home for a short while until I replaced = it with Debian. One of the things that held the BSD product line back=20 was the AT&T litigation, which IMHO, also helped Linux since most people = were under the misconception that Linux would be free of encumbrances.=20 Actually, had AT&T prevailed at that time, it would have affected Linux=20 and possibly OSF/2, Minix and Coherent. I think one reason why SCO was=20 not successful more recently is the products divergence from the Unix=20 traditions. --=20 Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
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