On 8/26/2019 7:27 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 5:14 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net 
> <mailto:krewat@kilonet.net>> wrote:
>
>     https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel
>
>     Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental
>     exercise, what
>     would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it
>     to be,
>     although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be?
>
>     I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged
>     kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly
>     ceded
>     my server space to Linux.
>
>     But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the
>     horror) Windows NT?
>
>
> BSD was in decent enough shape at the time to run on PCs. Though it 
> fragmented early through no fault of Linux. And the AT&T lawsuit 
> created a lot of FUD in the area without actually protecting System V. 
> It's unclear if another thing would have popped up to fill the void... 
> Linux flourished in the confusion, but without it, it's hard to know 
> if something else would have been developed before the AT&T lawsuit 
> settled.
>
> Warner
>
>
>     I do understand that this has been discussed on the list before. I
>     think, however, it would make a good late-summer exercise. Or late
>     winter depending on where you are :)
>
>     art k.
>
>
I ran both FreeBSD (up through at least 4.11 (and have the Tshirt) and 
NetBSD back in the 0.8 0.9 time frame.  My final -- (I used to move 
between them based on stability and driver support) -- move to Linux was 
caused by a lack of drivers for the Lenovo Workstation that used the 
Marvell 88SE63XX which with 5 SAS/SATA drives on it and 3 available on 
the Intel SATA controller would've been a great in-house server.

I really preferred the FreeBSD stability and docs back in the early 
1990's -- but by 2000 my jobs were all going Linux (Red Hat Sysadmin 
mostly) and I figured the work was moving to supported RHEL.  One of the 
things that often made me migrate was the support (in the early days) of 
all the weird interfaced cdrom drives like the Panasonic and other 
pre-ATAPI stuff.

I'm going to revisit the ZFS on Linux stuff when Ubuntu puts it in their 
installer.  That will finally get me what I want on the D20.

Bill