AIX is not dead yet.
SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.
Msft funded them for a while to do this:
They tried to use the DMCA for header files in the source. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/1815224/sco-invokes-dmca-names-headers-novell-steps-in
SCO always reminds me of this:
SCO Unix was mostly dead before then (not fully dead, just smelled like it). They were never the most popular Unix vendor to begin with. Caldera–a commercial Linux distro–had bought them out, and that’s when the legal trouble started.
All those old vendors tended to have one specific thing they were really good at. IIRC, the thing for SCO was that they could load up hundreds of users on a single box on 1990s hardware. No small feat when the traditional Unix model needs to
fork()a process for login/shell/whatever.It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)
It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.
Copyright, yes. And a lot of this is corporate history rather than the legal portion.
The only one of these I never used was AIX. My first unix was Unixware.
Actually Solaris is still squirming while the first shovels of dirt are being heaped on.
Eventually will be just BSD
Bless your heart.
Amen, freebsd crew represent!
And to anybody throwing shade:
BSD is literally the #1 mobile os, and has been for years, even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.
even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.
Okay, that is a hilarious way of saying those forks are back of the short bus “ssssspecial”.
I actually love the theory of the Mach nanokernel, I just also think Apple went their own way with it, defeating the purpose entirely.
Out of all those I only ever used Solaris and the most polite thing I can say is: I have no nostalgia for that time.
Weirdly, it stops there for a looooooooooong time
Aww, I miss Solaris.
There are a lot of hobby Unix-like OS’s however. I don’t see the point in most of them, but still.
You also forgot macOS. It’s a shitty “UNIX-certified” OS though.
Its a BSD derivat tho.
In a sense, NextStep is the only one of the old Unix vendors to still have a significant install base.
Irix is missing. It was quite cool at the time. (Well, its desktop was).
SCO died by self inflicted gunshot wounds.
Unfortunately, I have a very large client whose core business app runs on SCO still. They’re coming up on year 10 on their migration attempt.
Let me guess. A aged purpose built program used for something like inventory and accounting. Built with something like cobol or pascel. With a set of specific feature set that they are unable to or unwilling to pay for a updated rewrite?
I spent so much time working with Solaris, in a weird way I kinda miss it
You can still run Illumos/OpenIndiana, driver support will be spotty though
Qnx Unix still technically kicking
Quite popular in automotive and other embedded applications. License and support costs were driving the last company I worked for to explore Linux as an alternative though.
I used to work in the gambling industry and there were some absolutely ancient QNX boxes that ran a dialup modem stack for remote TAB offices
Qnx is certified and has (hard) rtos baked in.
But montavista and others give most of that by now for less and are more maintainable anyway.
No love for temple os 😢
OP rewrite this meme…right now! TempleOS or ban.
Temple OS wasn’t Unix-like.
Also it gets way too much attention as is IMO. Its the only hobby OS project people know about, purely because 4chan turned its mentally ill creator into a meme.
What other hobby operating systems have a cool hook like TempleOS’s religious thing?
I didn’t realize the pattern
While much of the Unix family has died, (especially in the System V family) there is an old one surviving and a few new additions being added.
Solaris is still alive, and from it was forked illumos. Meanwhile BSD has spawned its own family made up of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD, but also MacOS and Playstation. Other systems that appeared without any prior history like Linux include Redox OS and SerenityOS.
With that being said, the Unix family has noticeably shrunk, and the System V family is very much in danger of going extinct, with only the Solaris branch looking like it will survive the next year. If the System V family goes extinct, it would make the BSD family the only surviving branch descended from the original Unix.
Oh, and Minix still exists.
If you have an Intel based system with AMT, you’re running minix on a 486 and probably don’t know it.
I watch a lot of videos to this day from Bryan Cantrill (Oxide computer) and he’s got some wild stories about the forking of illumos and how difficult it was to essentially “save” Solaris. His company uses their own illumos based distro called heliOS on their oxide computer rack.
