On Mon, 26 Feb 2024, Goetz T. Fischer wrote:
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.
As someone who used all the major RISC systems in the 90s (and compiled quite a lot of GNU and other free code from original sources, and targeting those systems), it seems to me that the above is a mis-characterization of history, at least as pertains to SunOS, but also to other major RISC platforms.
Indeed, SunOS/Solaris was very popular in the '90s and remained reasonably popular until the Oracle take-over. Illumos continues strong, but with less popularity, given the lack of a major corporation backing it.
Perhaps only GNU make was an issue for software which was written to expect it. Software using GNU Autotools did/does not normally suffer from such issues.
I have just not encountered much problems at all with GNU software, since it has always had a policy to be portable.
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.
I am curious about the nature of those modifications that "most foss" programs require.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn [email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T00f6581e133964dc-Mba9e7d2e4770c5b973c6ca18 Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
