Comment by SllX
6 hours ago
> So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se
At the end of the day UNIX is an operating system. A dead operating system that hasn’t seen a release outside of Bell Labs since the 80s and even 10th Edition was 1988, and never distributed.
A branch of it persisted through System V and its variants, then it became a spec, then operating systems started calling themselves UNIX according to that spec whether they were Systems V offshoots or reconstructions stemming from Net/2.
We’ve been genuine turns away from Unix per se since before I was born. The SUS and POSIX lets people pretend like we’re not.
IMO, that's a pretty poor summary of how the "Unix Wars" really ended. Bell UNIX got productized into System V, and the trademark was dumped off on TOG.
But "Unix" was really more of an ideal. The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds. Imagine "Industry-standard APIs" which are actually non-negotiable, and not just some compliance-test. Well, you need the source code, right? We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
The “Unix Wars” battle lines were drawn in 1988 with the formation of the X/Open Group and Unix International, the same year Bell Labs put together the 10th Edition’s manual, more or less demarcating its release according to their own conventions even if it wasn’t sold nor distributed. Their next project was Plan 9.
Incidentally this was also the year of the last major version of AT&T’s System V, System V Release 4. There would be a couple more minor releases after that, but there was never a System V Release 5.
> The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds.
I don’t think Stallman nor Torvalds ever saw anything so romantic in UNIX. You could ask them, but it doesn’t jive with well anything in the historical record.
> We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
We have better operating systems, yes, and for a price and some elbow grease, some of them can even use the UNIX trademark which checks a box for some people who might care about that sort of thing.
9front it's the last 'Unix' release after Unix v8 and Unix v10.
Then that would be Inferno, given how little Plan 9 shares with UNIX, and Inferno had the same authors.
Plan 9 isn’t UNIX. 9front isn’t Plan 9 from Bell Labs.