[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps an interesting area of speculation is, "what would the world have
>>> looked like if USL v BSDi hadn't happened *and* SunOS was opened to the
>>> world?" I think in that parallel universe, Linux wouldn't have made it
>>> particularly far: absent the legal angle, what would the incentive had been
>>> to work on something that was striving to basically be Unix, when really
>>> good Unix was already available?
>>
>>> I agree.
>
> I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
> time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
> they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.

With the right license (BSD), I'd go so far as to saying there'd be no
BSD 4.4, or if there was, it would have been rebased from the SunOS
base... There were discussions between CSRG and Sun about Sun donating
it's reworked VM and VFS to Berkeley to replace the Mach VM that was
in there... Don't know the scope of these talks, or if they included
any of the dozens of other areas that Sun improved from its BSD 4.3
base... The talks fell apart over the value of the code, if the rumors
I've heard are correct.

Warner