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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest.

Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL.

They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it, would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company be convinced otherwise.

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Side note: I purchased Interix and used it to port a million-line C++/X11/Motif/OpenGL app to windows (successfully, although there wasn't really any demand for the result). Must have been '96 or '97. I didn't find it compelling, and the authors of the code decided to rewrite a new system from scratch, using Python and Tk (along with C++ and OpenGL) to be portable to all the commonly used platforms. That worked on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and later Mac OS X for at least 2 decades(!) with very little platform-specific code (except in the Tk dependency). They finally switched to Python/C++/Qt/OpenGL a few years back which I expect will work for another 20 years.

Interix/SFU/SUA was only the last pre-Linux iteration of Unix on top of Windows—a POSIX subsystem was included in NT from the beginning, even if it was practically useless to the point of having no network access (I believe early design documentation explicitly says it’s there to satisfy government contract requirements).

There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.

And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.

I'm pretty sure that even if SCO had all the rights to Unix that it thought it did [0], IBM would have found some way to make the problem go away even if involved buying SCO or effectively paying it protection money. Though from what I've seen of SCO's claims (I co-wrote one of the expert witness reports), it's hard for me to imagine they had much of a chance, Boies or no Boies.

[0] Which remains one of the most inexplicable aspects of the whole case to this day whether Novell pulled a fast one and/or SCO's lawyering was just incompetent.

Yes, but honest question, do you really think that if IBM had purchased SCO (and maybe throw Novell in there too) that Linux would have still had any chance? I don't know what the outcome, but I just think there's too many possibilities at that point for Linux to just stay hobbyist without corporate adoption (fearing now IBM licensing/lawyering at that point).

At the time of the SCO lawsuit, IBM had already made a huge bet on Linux. [1] Basically, that's why SCO sued them. And they had their own Unix (AIX) which they could have ported to x86 if they had wanted to--but they didn't.

Here's what the person who headed IBM's Linux initiative told me a couple of years back:

And I still remember very well in December of ‘99, I called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam, when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe we should wait until the new year. And in the second week of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM’s Linux initiative.

[1] https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2006/01/ibms_linux_init.html

Thank you for taking time to reply. It's awesome to see the insider's view a bit here.

No, Novell didn't pull a fast one. SCO didn't have the money to buy everything they wanted to buy, so the deal was deliberately structured so that they bought less. At the time, both sides knew it. And then most everybody who knew it left Caldera...

And, mind telling us which expert witness report?

I know that the deal was structured in the way it was because SCO didn't have enough money but I still find it bizarre that they entered a high-profile lawsuit with a fundamental misunderstanding of the cards they held. Did they really think that Cravath Swaine wouldn't notice?

They don't have titles as far as I can see. But basically around Unix history, whether it was reasonable that Linux caused SCO's distress (relative to Windows NT), supposed economic damages, credibility of various claims that weren't thrown out because of actual Unix ownership, Project Monterey, etc. My boss's name is on it so don't want to say more than that.

As I recall, Sun Microsystems was fond of reminding everyone that they'd bought and paid for a perpetual, irrevocable license to Unix, so there wasn't and couldn't be any legal issue with Solaris.

I found a commentary (https://landley.net/writing/halloween9.html) that says something similar:

> UnixWare and OpenServer were always minor versions of Unix, the versions belonging to other vendors have always been more important and more lucrative: Sun's Solaris, HP's HP-UX, and IBM's AIX being three surviving profitable examples. All of these companies have purchased "irrevocable, perpetual" licenses to AT&T's old Unix codebase, and will never owe SCO another dime for it.

So, if SCO had managed to kill Linux, then Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX could have stepped in to compete with Windows NT.

One of the reasons Linux was eating commercial Unix's lunch was that x86 hardware was cheaper than RISC workstations and had finally hit a point where it performed as well (and eventually better). RISC systems were on their way out, and commercial Unix companies didn't seem to want to give up that fight.

So commercial Unix vendors would have needed to sell x86 ports of their Unix systems to compete with Windows NT, but as a technical matter, those x86 ports already existed (Solaris x86 certainly did).

TLDR: If Linux had been killed, there would be other Unix options to compete with Window NT.

To be fair around WinNT 4.0 and Win2k, Microsoft had much better operating system compared to Linux. FreeBSD and Solaris were much better competitors.

Having worked in a Solaris shop for a while, I still wonder what could have been if Solaris made the decision to open-source about 5-10 years earlier than they did. I think Solaris would have been such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was. Though the licensing issues had to have been resolved for this to work out, and knowing Sun/Oracle - that would never have really worked out...

What's-his-name, the Sun CEO, hated both Microsoft and Open Source.

Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to the dustbin of history.

McNealy was "just" chairman of the board when OpenSolaris was released. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to describe CDDL as anti-GPL unless you think the Mozilla Public License is as well.

That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.

Ok, to rephrase that. They licensed Open Solaris in a certain way to make it explicitly incompatible with Linux' GPL2, or at least to sow enough doubt that the licenses are incompatible.

That didn't scream confidence in their ability to migrate to Open Source or their overall technical superiority, despite some very nice features.

I think it’s fair. They went out of their way to make the license incompatible so it couldn’t be mixed with GPL’ed code.

Had they moved sooner to open source, and embraced it instead of trying to create a moat around their stuff, they probably could’ve stayed relevant.

>such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was.

That's so true.

But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.

I was surprised by the success of Linux around 2000.

NT or Solaris were actually better and BSD variants had been around for a while.

Samba and Apache were the driving forces back then. In Germany, SUSE had great influence.

But Linux success is still amazing.

I recall the Halloween memos...

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