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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

ahem What of the free BSD derivatives?

The vision and individual will of Mr Torvalds cannot be discounted as a factor; yes all the communities around Linux did the work but they had not crystallized around a different core.

If M$ hadn't been such pure shits in the late 80s and onward, they could have had a lot of that community themselves. I think, in hindsight, the world may have worked out better for it tho. I can imagine a "source available" xenix based world where M$ plays the role of Apple without the lovingkindness. Imagine a human face being stamped by a "windows update" wait screen... forever.

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Had Microsoft taken POSIX support on Windows NT more seriously, Linux wouldn't have mattered.

As proven by hordes of UNIX developers using macOS and WSL.

Whatever happened to that? I've read the articles from the time how the NT kernel was designed to have Win32, POSIX and OS/2 as equal ways to talk to the kernel, via the subsystem architecture. And if you dig deep enough in modern Windows you find things that were probably invented for that (like support for case-sensitive names in NTFS), but the feature seems to have vanished as soon as it launched, only to be resurrected two decades later as WSL1.

I can just imagine Microsoft-internal politics went against the idea?

Yes, it was mostly for government contracts.

Eventually it got replaced by Interix, which was further replaced by SUA until Windows 8.

Naturally nowadays Linux syscalls compatibility relevance grew to the point that even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers, so WSL made more sense than plain POSIX.

I’m curious why Cygwin usually/always gets left out here, it’s been pretty damn good for a long time.

Cygwin is Awesome. It feels just like I'm in a VM but not a VM? And as it does not require admin rights, it doesn't need IT department blessing unlike WSL.

Because it always provided a half way experience outside of Windows itself, instead of embracing the whole platform.

Cygwin (which is in fact excellent) was only one of numerous Unix-on-Windows toolkits. Others included MKS Toolkit (from Mortice Kerns Systems) and UWin (from AT&T / David Korn, of Korn Shell fame).

There might've been an alternate universe where Sun didn't "do" Slowlaris but instead brought an affordable 32bit unix to desktops with SunOS. Linux would've been much less relevant in that world, too.

Indeed, until 2005 I only used Linux at home.

Work was all about HP-UX, AIX and Solaris, the exception being CERN in 2002.

They were slowly transitioning from Solaris into Linux for the clusters, while most researchers were either adopting OS X or Windows 2000.

I will never forgive Oracle for killing the Sun.

They didn't. They extended the life for eight more years and still make a profit from Sun hardware sales today. If you looked at the alternatives: IBM or stay independent then those were not going to end well. Oracle gave Sun life for eight more years.

Now, did it end well?

Oracle was the best think to happen to Sun in 2010. You have to understand the market dynamics at UNIX vendors at that point. Look around. There are zero UNIX server vendors any more.

Amazon and Azure and Google etc are UNIX server vendors: what they vend is just for rent rather than purchase.

They mostly run on Linux though, not Unix.

To be fair, IBM still has them. But IBM doesn’t care about AIX much anymore either.

Mostly they have a sustaining team, just like Oracle. Solaris is still supported but purely in a payed sustaining mode for legacy customers until 2034.

Oracle was the only company that even bothered to actually buy Sun assets.

Everyone else let it fall down hard on the floor, after management run the company into the ground.

It was Oracle that delivered into production the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging, still the best one at it today.

It was Oracle that made MaximeVM into a real product with GraalVM.

It was Oracle that pushed Java design from its long term stagnation.

Yes there were victims along the way.

Without Oracle not even the former ones would have taken place.

Oracle bought Sun because they wanted MySQL. To me, it looks like they noticed everything else in their portfolio only after they bought it.

“Oops. We accidentally bought a CPU design, a complete enterprise OS, a virtual machine, an Office suite and quite a handful of other things. Let’s just pretend we didn’t.”

Or what exactly has survived the sellout?

Nothing would have survived, that is the point.

Java would have died at version 6, never open source (process was finalized under Oracle's management).

GraalVM would never existed.

Solaris would have died.

All Sun assets would have been taken by the debt collectors and done accordingly.

And now, Solaris has, in fact, died, other projects have left ‘Orrible before it was too late. It’s all over and gone because Oracle bought it and does not care.

(One could debate whether keeping Java alive was a good thing.)

Still better than dying in 2010.

Solaris licenses are still being sold, then again, Oracle hatters tend to like free beer instead of understanding how to keep lights on a running business.

> Oracle bought Sun because they wanted MySQL.

You're way of in the weeds.

Can we stop blaming every bullshit on Oracle? Every company is just a paperclip-machine optimizing for money (after a not too big size). They will all chop off your hand if you stick it inside without second thought.

Kindness, or care from a company only means that pretending that emotion towards something is financially better than not caring, or eradicating that something.

It AT&T wouldn’t have been such a PITA in the late 80s, Linux would not exist. BSD became “free” one year too late, sadly.

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