On 10/15/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/10/2007, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and painful and to be vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama and forking, and it's doing just fine: http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
Mostly because Linux came along and whacked the rest upside the head.
Actually, we had the University of California, Berkeley release the essentially AT&T-Free 4.3 Net 2 BSD, followed by several spinoff projects from the Net2 release in the same timeframe as Linux (386BSD, which spun out FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSDI). Had Linus been hit by a bus (perish the thought) in 1991 we'd have had a very similar open source movement, just with a different free flavor of Unix.
It's true that open source Unix kicked the industry upside the head to some degree, but the particular flavor wasn't important.