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.
That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.
That didn't scream confidence in their ability to migrate to Open Source or their overall technical superiority, despite some very nice features.
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.
That's so true.
But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.
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.
[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.
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
And, mind telling us which expert witness report?
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.
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.