[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/19/2023 1:12 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 2/19/2023 9:09 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 2/18/2023 9:49 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> No, but no one could manage to do what RedHat did with a
>>> commercial Unix version.
>>
>> In their days the commercial unixes did pretty well.
> 
> A question I'd ask, is, would Linux have done so well, if it was nothing 
> more than "free Unix"?

I am pretty sure that it was not the technical differences
between Linux and Unix that made Linux beat the
commercial Unixes.

License cost must have been a huge factor. Directly: companies
liked to avoid the license fee. But also indirectly: students
learned Linux because it was free and companies liked an
OS where their new hires had skill.

But there was also hardware cost. Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and
Tru64 was running on expensive hardware while Linux ran
on cheaper x84-64 hardware (Solaris did also support x86-64
besides the primary platform SPARC).

And then there is the vendor independence. With Linux you
were not tied to SUN/IBM/HP/DEC. Some companies liked that.
Especially after all the Unix chaos with OSF vs UI and
the nasty interaction between usage of different code bases
and corporate business strategies.

But there were also free Unixes running on x86-64 available
back then. Why Linux and not them? My best guess is that
Linux had better "marketing" - not traditional marketing
aka slick sales people selling to big companies, but the
internet developer to developer talk type of marketing -
Linux was cool while *BSD was old.

Arne