Vaughan-Nichols said that as important as its dodgy business deals were for its success, Microsoft didn’t have to cheat to win. The Unix companies did a great job of killing themselves off.
They fought over Unix software standards for Unix that were too vague, such as the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) – or they got stuck in the business fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the Unix wars.
While the Unix companies were tearing each other apart, Vole was laughing all the way to the bank.
The main problem was that the Unix companies couldn’t agree on software standards. Software makers had to write apps for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a tiny desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an app for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and another for SunOS.
By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was pushed out on the regular desktop, and the workstation became a Sun Microsystems-only thing.
“Linux had two significant advantages over the Unix distros. The first was that it was open source. The excellent code survives in open source’s meritocracy, and the lousy code dies. In particular, I credit Linux’s use of the GNU General Public License (GPL),” Vaughan-Nichols said.
However even Open Source could not save Unix. If all it took for success were open-source code, we’d all be running pure BSD operating systems such as FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, and GhostBSD. Instead, while the BSD Unix systems are still critical, they have nothing like Linux’s market share.
The reason for this, as David Wheeler, today the Linux Foundation’s Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, explained, was the BSD license has been troublesome because, every few years, someone says, “Hey, let’s start a company based on this BSD code”
They pull the *BSD code in and some of the best BSD developers and write a closed derivative. But as a closed vendor, their fork becomes pricey to keep up, and eventually, the company goes bust.
“Meanwhile, the GPL has legally forced a consortia on big commercial companies, All are contributing, and feel safe in doing so because the others are legally required to do the same. It’s created a ‘safe’ zone of cooperation.”
Linux’s other killer advantage was it had Linus Torvalds. With Torvalds as Linux’s supreme dalek, it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting as those causing trouble would be exterminated in a torrent of abuse.
Vaughan-Nichols thinks that Linux sellers and developers have learned their Unix history lessons.
They’ve realised that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system.