Comment by icedchai
8 hours ago
I'm not saying it would've been easy. They could've installed the GNU tools in a different path and left it up to the user to change their preference. They did something similar with putting the BSD tools in "/usr/ucb" (I may have that path wrong.)
that would have required them to swallow their pride, and admit GNU tools were in demand, which didn't fit the marketing narrative.
They could've also just built a real package manager, left it up to the community to add GNU tools. I remember the Solaris package situation being annoying, having to download crap off FTP and install manually. Or often build from source.
Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.