[lug] United Linux

[rm at fabula.de]

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 01:12:34PM -0600, Ed Hill wrote:
> [...] 
> 
> Woah.  Get your facts straight.  

As i said, i was much too young (and didn't have enough money to buy 
on of those nice Sparcs/SGIs).

> The "Unix wars" (lawsuits mostly,
> though the term is also used to refer to the myriad incompatibilities)
> were very real.  

I was refering to the later / at least that's what i read  about in the 
(unix) magazines i read back then. Maybe let me put it this way: Most
of these incompatibilities where about as big as the ones between Win3/1,
Win95/NT/2000 ... Nothing a good admin should fear. Still, the "Unix wars"
are often (ab)used as an explanation of why UNIX lost ground to NT in the
early 90th. Shure, this _was_ used as a selling point by MS sales people,
but this is (as i tried to say) marketing talk. A lot of those UNIX shops
today seem to like the idea that they lost ground because of a "brother war"
(how tragic) rather then because of bad customer treatment. I recently had
the chance to play a bit with an 92 Intergraph Graphic Workstation (Clipper
chip, two (!) 21' color monitors, graphic tablet and plotter -- their own
pseudo UNIX). Really nice box for the time (and really expensive, ca. 100 000$).
To my amazement, when i tried to open a third xterm i got a  licence warning!
You need to have a second licence if you want to log in more than twice.[1]
I have lot's of similar stories , often from a time when Linux allready was
a serious threat (HPs UNIX with perl 4 (!) ...). THAT, and the outrageous
prices made customers turn to WinNT (and later to Linux).

> And the problems persist today.  See this prescient
> 1993 paper that Bob Young credits as being motivation to start Red Hat:
> 
>   http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html
> 
> My point is that adoption of standards, such as the LSB, is a move to
> help avoid having the same happen to Linux.
> 
> 
> > Never said anything against standards. Au contraire.
> 
> Good, then we agree on that.  ;-)

Yes, i see.

 Ralf

[1] That box still is for offer. Free, but you need to get the shipping
    done (cool harware  for nerds. No, i couldn't find a Linux distro for
    that).


> Ed
> 
> -- 
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