On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 09:47:34AM -0500, Alvin Starr wrote: > > If I remember correctly BSDI was selling their variant until long after > linux caught on. > Remember the first distributions showed up in 1992 and we were building some > small in house systems based on SLS and Yggdrasil at Siemens around that > time. > > I could never prove it but my belief is that BSDI would have continued to > sell their Unix if it were not for Linux. > Bill Jolitz may have taken a run at a free system with his bsd variant but > its not clear what would have happened with the various law suits floating > around at that time.when we did some business with him a few years before he > was very sensitive to the AT&T lawyers and was careful to insure source code > did not leak out. > > I doubt that an established company would have brought out a free operating > system just because the conventional wisdom was and still is that you need > to protect your intellectual property and giving it away is madness. > > Almost all the original free software came from individuals or very small > groups. > I would bet that if Linus Torvalds knew how big linux were to become he > would have licensed it some how.
I don't know if he would have. He obviously (as per the original announcement) didn't think it would ever be anything other than a fun toy. -- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
