[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

In article <tsu14t$g5l7$1 at dont-email.me>,
Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>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.

Not at the time, nope.

>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).

x86_64 didn't exist when this was happening.  It came in
2000 or so.  There's an ironic DEC tie-in, but that's
another story.

>And then there is the vendor independence. With Linux you
>were not tied to SUN/IBM/HP/DEC. Some companies liked that.

"Sun" not "SUN"

>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.

Nope.  It had more to do with the USL/UCB lawsuit and the
presumed effect that that would have on the freely-available
BSD code.  Since Linux was a clean-room reimplementation, it
wasn't encumbered by AT&T copyright, and would thus be "safe"
should AT&T win in court.

What's ironic is that the people making these decisions didn't
quite understand the AT&T lawsuit, which was about _trade secret
status_ of Unix, not copyright.  AT&T was trying to say that it
was the system interface that was the real intellectual property
that was being violated, not the specific expression of that
interface.  This would have affected Linux, too, despite being
an independent reimplementation.

Fortunately, the court sided with Berkeley and rejected USL's
trade secret claims on the basis that the system interface was
well documented and had been in the industry for decades (and
that Ken and Dennis used to mail tapes to universities for the
cost of media and shipping).

	- Dan C.