How Linux killed Unix: the UNIX Wars
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Published 2023-03-08
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#unix #linux
00:00 Intro
00:52 Sponsor: 100$ free credit for your Linux or Gaming server
01:52 Unix: the OG operating system
03:59 The Rise of Linux
05:24 The Death of Commercial Unix
09:52 Why didn't BSD? take the cake?
11:46 The Legacy of Unix
13:10 Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly
14:07 Support the channel
Unix was developed in the mid 1960s by Bell Labs, and it was a single task system written in Assembly, before it moved to C.
It still exists today, mainly in Solaris, previously owned by Sun, but now by Oracle, and others less ran options. These systems were born out of the open source code that was published before Unix became commercial.
Apart from BSD, most other Unix systems are now proprietary and generally limited to industry, finance or health related activities. They're also generally sold with the hardware they run on.
You probably all know that Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds while he was a student in Helsinki. He enjoyed Unix but at that point, the system had become proprietary, and so couldn't be tailored to his needs. As a pet project, he created his own kernel that was basically a Minix clone, itself a Unix clone, which Torvalds wanted to modify to run on 32 bit systems.
Interestingly, while Linux doesnt share any code with Unix, the kernel absolutely behaves like Unix. Linux is also POSIX compliant. POSIX being a standard that was created because so many Unix variants were popping up, that is was necessary to ensure they all worked in a similar way and were compatible with each other.
And you might wonder how a hobby project developed as open source managed to replace a commercial, company backed, already installed system. And the reasons are many.
At first, Unix couldn't be commercialized as a product, because AT&T had entered an agreement with the US government stating they wouldn't try and sell computer software. That meant Unix was sold for the cost of shipping and printing the tapes
You received the source code as-is and patching options were limited, which meant most people who bought Unix bought it to maintain it and fix it themselves, which led to many companies creating their own versions of Unix and sharing the source code with one another.
The agreement ended, though, and this meant AT&T could start selling Unix as a product, as could other companies. With the ability to commercialize Unix came a huge competitive battle, with each company now realizing there was money to be made, and stopping the flow of source code. Every unix version started to diverge from each other and to behave differently, which killed one of the big advantages of Unix.
ALl these sytems and competition is referred to as the Unix wars.
Also at that point, personal computers were really starting to take off, and Microsoft dominated that space with Windows.
Unix also was really only a way to sell computers that ran on RISC chips. At the time, Intel's x86 was a very limited architecture, had poor performance compared to RISC CPUs, and was only suitable to be produced en masse cheaply for the end user.
But with these sales, Intel, and then AMD were able to fund the development of better chips, which in turn outgrew the RISC chips that Unix depended on to be sold.
But why Linux and not BSD? BSD had existed for longer, it was a known quantity, and it worked in the same way as what companies were used to.
The gist of it is legal battles. BSD was slowly moving away from code used in the original SYSTEM V, which AT&T held the rights to. AT&T then sued Berkeley Software Design, arguing they had breached Unix's license contract, that their code infringed on copyright, and that it diluted the UNIX trademark.
With this lawsuit, BSD was prevented from distributing the Net/2 release until the case was decided, which basically stopped them in their tra
All Comments (21)
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well linus torvalds didnt had the idea back then that his pet project could lead to be more than 600 linux varients mad respect to linus torvalds and the team
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Fun fact. I was fired from a consulting job for installing Linux on a server about 18 years ago! It was a Solaris shop. Anyone remember Solaris? LOL.
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Fun fact: the name POSIX was coined by Richard Stallman who was a member of the working group trying to standardize UNIX like OSes.
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I love how macOS is like back to unix on risc. Like it is just funny how circular it is.
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One, small nit-pick: macOS does not use a "BSD kernel". Rather, it is based on the XNU kernel, originally developed at NeXT and derived from the Mach microkernel from Carnegie Mellon University. The BSD part comes in as the toolset placed on top of this kernel.
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The writing was on the wall in the 90s. Companies like Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, DEC/Compaq, etc all had huge numbers of people in house developing their own UNIX OS. It was obvious it would just make sense for them to all switch to Linux and share the work of others and no longer have to have these people all in-house supporting their own proprietary Operating Systems from top to bottom which is very complicated and expensive to do.
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I'm a "senior" sysadmin by trade. Despite being in my mid-20s, it wasn't difficult to take over AIX (IBM Power) and Solaris (Sun/Oracle SPARC) thanks to messing with Linux and BSD for half of my life. Hardware is quite interesting. For instance, on POWER systems you can disable certain parts of memory if it's damaged instead of sending a technician onsite to replace a faulty RAM module. UNIX OSes such as AIX or Solaris are being decommisioned enmasse. They became a liability now that the world is moving towards containers and ""cloud"". You need really skilled people to manage those systems as well, which costs a lot more. If you've ever used OpenBSD, you would feel at home in AIX (or vice versa). Solaris feels suprisingly modern, I'd say very similar to Linux with SystemD and OpenZFS/ZOL. Funny thing is that back in the 80s UNIX was running on RISC CPUs (ppc/sparc etc). Now apple moved back to RISC (aarch64) CPUs. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes :)
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This is very informative! I like your presentation style, so I hope you keep making these kinds of history videos :)
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"The year of BSD desktop is near! All Hail Beastie 3:-)" Now seriously, I frinking love FreeBSD and OpenBSD, great OS's.
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Gotta love that corporate greed killed their own product, and they Still haven't learned from it.
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8:10 I can't even imagine living in times where there were fightings between what would be the standardized Unix format lol
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Nick keeps saying that "UNIX had become proprietary", which he probably means "no longer gives access to source code" - but it's important to understand that UNIX was always a proprietary commercial product with no free-to-distribute components. At the time, and because of its portability and plethora of processor technologies, most UNIX licenses were source licenses where customers paid for a copy of the source code and were expected to modify it to their needs - and under specific circumstances - share their changes with other licensees.
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I got my first taste of Unix at uni / college in the early 90s on Sun's SPARCstation. I spent way too much time in the lab, the only place we had access to this stuff. News traveled less quickly in those days, but when we started to hear about Linux, everyone got super exited. Having something like Unix at home on your "cheap" x86 PC was mindbogglingly awesome. I felt the awe and wonder again ... which I last felt in the Amiga era.
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Always love a history lesson on a subject I'm into.
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Thanx for the history lesson. Back in the 90s when I did voicemail systems support i got to use ScoUnix (Bostontech) and QNX (Centigram) Both were very robust and would run for months without a reboot on 286 to Pentium 1 PCs .
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Good coverage. I'm glad you mentioned that Linux Torvalds needed to the GNU utilities in order to get GNU/Linux (as R. Stallman would refer it as) off the ground. As a side note, you should have mentioned SCO LNUX and Microsoft Xenix as sidenotes before Linux matured on x86.
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I think the GNU license is also part of the reason that Linux dominated. The GNU license prevented the fragmentation that affected the initial version of Linux.
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I like the picture where Beastie and Tux are riding motorcycles together on the same road. This most accurately reflects the "confrontation" between Linux and BSD. There is no confrontation, just two families of similar systems, each good for its own range of tasks.
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I love theses historical informative videos, great job Nick. Unix may be dead by its restrictive measures, but it still lives on as a spiritual successor through BSD and Linux and Richard Stallman worked at MIT and then left to start the GNU project.
