[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[David Arnold]

> On 19 Feb 2020, at 13:56, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:27:47PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:

<…>

>> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
>> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
>> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
>> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
>> GPL'ed or otherwise.
> 
> I agree with that.

This “displacement” has really only been widely true in the last 5-10 years.

“Open Systems” seemed to peak (from my recollection) around the early 90’s.  The Unix model and POSIX APIs became dominant, and VMS, NonStop, MVS, VM, etc, etc, died away, often together with their hardware.  The exception to this was Windows NT (and descendants) which killed the Open System era, and dominated the small to mid-size markets, leaving Open Systems and the remnants of proprietary OSes to large and/or specialised niches.

One factor behind the success of Windows Server was that the PC hardware market’s brutal competition led to decent quality hardware at a fraction of the price of competing platforms.  This overwhelmed the advantages of Open Systems, and the movement stalled — people were willing to buy into a proprietary OS again, because it was *cheap*, despite just recently having escaped OS lock-in with Open Systems.

Concurrent with the rise of Windows was the emergence of Linux (and early on, the *BSDs).  The PC Unices (including Linux) leveraged the PC platform like Windows did.  But it was the dotcom era, and the availability of dirt cheap virtual hosts that had to run Linux because the licensing cost of Windows Server was an order of magnitude more than the virtual hardware, which has resulted in Linux (and thus POSIX APIs and a Unix model) being almost ubiquitous today.

I think it’s a mistake to conflate Open Systems with Free/Open Source Software.  Despite eg. POSIX being the root of both, Open Systems was dead in the market well before FOSS operating systems took off outside academic environments.




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