[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

In article <tsu4h0$13i$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>>>When Linux was new, that was all it was.  There were some competitors like 
>>>xinu and minix, but Linux actually provided a full functional system.  Because
>>>it was unixlike, there was plenty of existing software for it (including the
>>>whole gnu back catalogue).  Because it was free, the barriers to entry were
>>>very low.
>>
>>Neither Xinu nor Linux was a competitor to Linux; both were
>>pedagogical systems designed for teaching.  I do think they
>>filled a bit of a niche among enthusiasts, but Linux's early
>>competitors were things like COHERENT (absolutely killed by
>>Linux) and commercial distributions of System V.  I suppose
>>Arne will now tell us those are doing just fine.
>
>Linux was ALSO a pedagogical system designed for teaching, and came very

This is emphatically not true.

Linux started as a personal project of Linus Torvalds after he
grew frustrated with Minix, but was never designed for teaching.
Succinctly, he wanted something that was a real Unix, not a
teaching system.  Andy Tannenbaum wasn't interested in that.

In fact, Linux was heavily (and famously) criticized by
Tannenbaum for not being sufficiently influenced by the current
at the time academic thinking.

>stripped down without much more than a kernel at first.  But it grew.

That is true.

>And folks added other stuff into the distribution, most of it from gnu.

This is not true.  People created distributions around the Linux
kernel that bundled GNU utilities and so forth, but that has
always been separate from Linux itself (which is just the
kernel).  There are also distributions that don't contain GNU
code, such as Alpine Linux.

>It took a couple years before Linux was able to compete with something
>like COHERENT or QNX.

Yeah, like 2 to become better than COHERENT.  Torvalds announced
Linux in August, 1991; MWC (producers of COHERENT) went defunct
in 1995 following several years of sales collapse due to
competition from Linux.

Many would argue that Linux is still not particuarly competitive
against QNX, which occupies a specific market niche.

	- Dan C.