How Linux killed Unix: the UNIX Wars
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#unix #linux
00:00 Intro
00:52 Sponsor: 100$ free credit for your Linux or Gaming server
01:52 Unix: the OG operating system
03:59 The Rise of Linux
05:24 The Death of Commercial Unix
09:52 Why didn’t BSD? take the cake?
11:46 The Legacy of Unix
13:10 Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly
14:07 Support the channel
Unix was developed in the mid 1960s by Bell Labs, and it was a single task system written in Assembly, before it moved to C.
It still exists today, mainly in Solaris, previously owned by Sun, but now by Oracle, and others less ran options. These systems were born out of the open source code that was published before Unix became commercial.
Apart from BSD, most other Unix systems are now proprietary and generally limited to industry, finance or health related activities. They’re also generally sold with the hardware they run on.
You probably all know that Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds while he was a student in Helsinki. He enjoyed Unix but at that point, the system had become proprietary, and so couldn’t be tailored to his needs. As a pet project, he created his own kernel that was basically a Minix clone, itself a Unix clone, which Torvalds wanted to modify to run on 32 bit systems.
Interestingly, while Linux doesnt share any code with Unix, the kernel absolutely behaves like Unix. Linux is also POSIX compliant. POSIX being a standard that was created because so many Unix variants were popping up, that is was necessary to ensure they all worked in a similar way and were compatible with each other.
And you might wonder how a hobby project developed as open source managed to replace a commercial, company backed, already installed system. And the reasons are many.
At first, Unix couldn’t be commercialized as a product, because AT&T had entered an agreement with the US government stating they wouldn’t try and sell computer software. That meant Unix was sold for the cost of shipping and printing the tapes
You received the source code as-is and patching options were limited, which meant most people who bought Unix bought it to maintain it and fix it themselves, which led to many companies creating their own versions of Unix and sharing the source code with one another.
The agreement ended, though, and this meant AT&T could start selling Unix as a product, as could other companies. With the ability to commercialize Unix came a huge competitive battle, with each company now realizing there was money to be made, and stopping the flow of source code. Every unix version started to diverge from each other and to behave differently, which killed one of the big advantages of Unix.
ALl these sytems and competition is referred to as the Unix wars.
Also at that point, personal computers were really starting to take off, and Microsoft dominated that space with Windows.
Unix also was really only a way to sell computers that ran on RISC chips. At the time, Intel’s x86 was a very limited architecture, had poor performance compared to RISC CPUs, and was only suitable to be produced en masse cheaply for the end user.
But with these sales, Intel, and then AMD were able to fund the development of better chips, which in turn outgrew the RISC chips that Unix depended on to be sold.
But why Linux and not BSD? BSD had existed for longer, it was a known quantity, and it worked in the same way as what companies were used to.
The gist of it is legal battles. BSD was slowly moving away from code used in the original SYSTEM V, which AT&T held the rights to. AT&T then sued Berkeley Software Design, arguing they had breached Unix’s license contract, that their code infringed on copyright, and that it diluted the UNIX trademark.
With this lawsuit, BSD was prevented from distributing the Net/2 release until the case was decided, which basically stopped them in their tracks.
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