How Linux killed Unix: the UNIX Wars

hey everyone this is Nick and Linux based operating systems are the most used in the entire world Linux dominates the server Market with about 96 of the first 1 million servers running Linux it dominates the smartphone market with about 85 percent of smartphones running on Linux based operating system namely Android and it dominates the desktop well maybe not that one not yet anyway but before Linux there was Unix it's a unit system a very very popular operating system that dominated in research Academy and multiple companies and the server space as well so how did we go from a big range of commercial Unix offerings that dominated the world to Linux erasing basically everything and how did we go from this introduction to this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so what was or is UNIX well a eunuch is a man who's got certain body parts room oh wait no sorry we're talking about Unix not you nux so Unix was developed in the mid-1960s by the MIT Bell labs and general electronic at the time it was called Unix with a CS at the end not an X it was the follow-up to multix which was another operating system very complex to use very heavy Unix stands for uniplexed information and Computing service and it was a single task system written in assembly before it moved to c over time it gained a bunch of features like multitasking multi-user capabilities and networking and it really took off because it became very portable being written in C meant that Unix was way more portable than most other operating systems that were available at the time and at the time it was a very important thing because you didn't just have x86 and arm you had up to 16 different processor architectures at some point supported by Unix and with that portability Unix conquered the world s from the owner none other than atnt and I talk about Unix in the past but it still exists today mainly in Solaris previously owned by Sun but now by Oracle and there are other less ran options all these systems were born out of the open source code that was published before Unix became fully commercial and that open source code also sprouted another Branch a little thing you might know as BSD yeah BSD is UNIX although they do not use any of the original Unix code nowadays apart from BSD most other Unix systems are now proprietary and generally limited to Industry Finance or health related companies they are also generally sold with the hardware they run on and it still has its advantages like stability and security seeing as there is very little malware developed for Unix so how did we go from Unix everywhere to Linux ate my launch you probably all know that Linux was developed by Linus store volts well 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 tovaults wanted to modify to run on 32-bit systems and the rest is history he opened up the source code finished the first version in 91 and then a full operating system was built on top of that kernel thanks to the new tools developed by the free software Foundation of Richard stallman and this little hobby project became the foundation of the most used operating system in the world dominating 99 of the various niches that Unix used to occupy interestingly while Linux doesn't share any code with Unix the kernel absolutely behaves like it the general architecture and philosophy of the system is incredibly similar on purpose it's built with small programs that do one task well and that can talk to each other through the use of pipes to pass the output of a program to another Linux is also posix compliant posix being a standard that was created because so many Unix variants were popping up that it was necessary to ensure they all worked in a similar way and were compatible with each other so you could say that Linux is the spiritual successor to Unix 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 atnt had entered an agreement with other companies saying that they wouldn't try and sell computer software that meant Unix was a hobby project for them it was sold for the cost of shipping and printing the tapes yes tapes not drives not disks not floppy disks tapes you receive the source code as is and patching options were limited it 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 atnt had ended though and this meant that they could now start selling Unix as a product as could other companies and at the time it was seen more as a way to sell expensive Hardware giant mainframes that came with Unix to have something to run on them the money wasn't the hardware not the software and it still kinda is today look at Apple they're enormous margins aren't made on the software they're made on the hardware they sell and the software is just a gateway to attract you to buy the product and also a way to collect all your personal data Gap with the ability to commercialize Unix came a huge competitive market with each company that had developed and maintained their own Unix version realizing there was money to be made by selling that and stopping the flow of Open Source Code between the various Unix variants every Unix version started to diverge from each other and to behave differently which killed one of the big advantages of Unix it was the standard you learned at University and that you kept using because you knew it and so the first problem appeared with expensive hardware and multiple potentially incompatible variants of Unix to choose from universities decided that Unix might not be a viable option and so Berkeley based themselves of the code of Unix to create BSD and have their own version of Unix that they could run they could open up and share without hemorrhaging cash now at some point companies realized that this was a problem and decided to try and standardize things to avoid risking Unix becoming completely irrelevant that's when posix was finally adopted as the standard after a bunch of other standards were proposed discussed denied it was a mess all these systems and this competition is referred to as the Unix Wars all vendors wanted to be the standard there were legal battles of Plenty and it made the Unix landscape a confusing mess for potential customers who do you buy from is it safe from litigation what are the differences and what are the advantages if you think choosing a Linux distro is confusing try doing the same between multiple commercial offerings that come on multiple thousands of dollars mainframes as a company the business decision is impossible to make and it turned Unix into a bad word it made it impossible to Market which really hurt it in the long run also at that point personal computers were really starting to take off in the late 80s and early 90s and Microsoft just dominated that space with Windows which meant customers were not as familiar with Unix as they once were Unix also was really only your way to sell mainframes and big computers stuff that ran on risk chips at the time Intel's x86 was a very limited it architecture it had poor performance compared to risk CPUs and it was only suitable to be produced on mass 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 risk chips that Unix depended on to be sold and at that point why would you rack your brain and try to pick from a variant of Unix that might be safe for litigation might be sold on the exact computer that you need running a risk chip when you could just buy any big computer with an x86 CPU that has now caught up in terms of performance and just slap an open source operating system without any license fees on it the choice was easy and Commercial Unix basically died but why did people use Linux and not BSD BSD had existed for longer it was a known quantity and it worked in the same way as Unix 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 5 which atnt held the rights to they had redeveloped all the utilities and finalized removing all atnt files in 1991. in the net 2 release of BSD atnt 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 and so BSD was ordered to completely stop Distributing all their software until the case was resolved which would take about two years which meant that the project was stopped in their track for a long time but apparently not enough time to create a decent logo this also meant that companies steered clear of BSD because it its future was uncertain and you probably did not want to take the legal risks to use something that was under legal threats this left the field wide open for Linux to be developed and adopted instead of the expensive commercial Unix packages that had the OS and the hardware bundled and Torvalds even stated that if BSD had been available at the time he would probably never have developed Linux in the first place and so that's why Linux dominates in all the spaces Unix used to occupy Unix became too big for its own good and completely not understandable for consumers it was also very expensive and any other alternative was just under legal threats and so completely unsafe to use by companies and so companies and universities flocked to that Unix compatible kernel and operating system instead of bothering with commercial Unix now this doesn't mean that Unix is dead it lives on in all the BSD distributions and in Mac OS and iOS both being based on a BSD kernel it also found a spiritual successor in Linux which follows the Unix principles to the letter and is posix compliant there are still commercial versions of Unix being sold the main one being Sons Solaris available to everyone and also sold within big mainframes and Unix left a rich Heritage in two days operating systems they invented the man command to access manual pages although should we really thank them for that I mean those things are completely legible the posix standard also only exists thanks to the Unix Wars pipes you can use in the Linux command line interface were invented for Unix why which led to the creation of Vim was also a Unix tool Unix isn't dead it's just transcended to another plane of existence it's more of a guiding Foundation or inspiration than a commercial social product nowadays and when you think about it Linux almost didn't exist if BSD was ensued if 88 and T didn't have this weird agreement that precluded them from selling Unix right when they developed it or if the x86 architecture had never taken off and had been a bus for companies we might all be using a Unix variant instead of Linux but as it happened Linux just ate Unix and it was delicious like this Segway to today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and your plan is to run Linux on it you should probably stop looking at Windows devices and buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point all their devices are openable upgradeable repairable and they have plenty of customization options when you buy them to change the CPU the ram the the SSD the GPU you can even customize the logo on the lid of your laptop or the keyboard layout that you want they have a ton of choice so if you want to replace your computer and you want to ensure that it has the best Linux compatibility you can have click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links down there to support it from PayPal to patreon to YouTube memberships whatever you want it's down there if you want in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 183,095

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2022, opensource, free software, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2022, linux tutorial 2022, linux vs windows, linux killed unix, how linux ate unix, linux vs unix, linux compared unix, linux unix windows, unix wars, commercial unix, solaris oracle, HP UX, IBM AIX, unix command, is linux unix, what is unix, unix history, linux is unix, unix became linux

Id: NF9cus43RMY

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023