alt Hacker NewsI think you are a possibly a decade off on the timing here.
USL v. BSDi is what impacted the BSD side, and it was during that lawsuit before Novell bought USL etc.... that the problems were that allowed Linux to make gains while the net/2 distros were in a waiting game IMHO.
The timing absolutely helped Linux and GNU being packaged as a complete system by the various distros etc..., and common OSS distribution points like Walnut Creek and PHT were very much concerned about USL v. BSDi and in an era when you had to make long distance phone calls to download with a modem, a lack of CDroms etc... absolutely caused a dip in adoption of the BSDs.
By the time the IBM v. SCO lawsuits happened (2003) the UNIX wars were long gone and Linux was already established.
SCO/Interactive/Coherent/etc... and other x86ish UNIXes were quite common in my work in the early 1990s, but the whole unix wars is way to complicated to cover in a single post.
The post .com bubble SCO lawsuits really just didn't matter much, the consolidation that happened in the early 90's that ended the UNIX wars, plus Intel killing most of the commercial unix independent CPUs with Itanium untruths and impossible promises and an inability for the major vendors to adapt to a lower margin model etc... killed those off.
The SCO lawsuits were really just the flailing of a dyeing company which was the end result of WordPerfect buying Novell with Novells money and local Utah politics.
Sorry, I don’t think my point was very clear. I wasn’t saying that SCO sued Linux in the 90s nor that the UNIX wars had zero impact.
Just that FreeBSD was still used a lot in the 90s and managed (at least from what I experienced) to dodge most of the concerns that companies had deploying other UNIXes.
I mean, it’s not like UNIX use dropped to zero overnight.
So you did see a lot of Internet companies using FreeBSD as their platform of choice. For a while, it really did look like FreeBSD was becoming the dominant server platform in that domain. Not everyone too Linux serious at that time. It wasn’t until at least 99 when Linux became a viable competitor to FreeBSD.
But once Linux did gain favour its popularity sky rocketed. Which is exactly why SCO took various Linux shops to court.