as somebody who "grew up" with proprietary unix on proprietary risc machines, i know what you mean and share your sentiment. the fact that gnu has such a dominance these days is simply based on the circumstance that it was the only free (i.e. no-cost) alternative in the 90s. hence all the foss development took place on linux with gnu stuff and therefore required gnu specific features. the latter required non-gnu systems to get the gnu parts as well because otherwise the mentioned foss stuff wouldn't compile and/or run. this quickly turned into a vicious circle if you want.
a good and not so ancient example is solaris 11.3 which introduced rather small changes to nm and a few other tools if i remember correctly. that broke a fair number of foss buildsystems which forced users to move /usr/gnu/bin to the very front of their $PATH. of course all of that only applies to public foss things. if you write your own software from scratch, you can of course use whatever you want. in fairness, back in the day, having the same usual suspect basic system programs or even single functions behave in different ways, was not so great either. for each os a program had to be customized to some extent. if you're not familiar with such situations, just have a look at the userlands of any illumos distribution or solaris' own userland and you'll see that most foss programs require modifications, despite using the basic gnu tools. just because it's not linux. On Sun, 25 Feb 2024 11:56:41 -0500, hack3rcon via illumos-discuss wrote: > GNU is like a virus. As if it is impossible to have an operating system that > has nothing to do with GNU and Linux! -- R-A-C Götz T. Fischer CertIT&Comp +49(0)7225/98 98 79 [email protected] r-a-c.de ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T00f6581e133964dc-Me63c45399e5c5354c1bc262c Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
