[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 08:09:18PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> 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.

So as much as I know, I was not privy to these talks.  I didn't even know
they were happening.