Unix Wars: nine years over a platform tax that vanished
The Unix Wars timeline: how AT&T's 1984 commercialization, OSF vs UI, the BSD lawsuit, and Linux's GPLv2 collapsed the platform tax by 1993.
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The Unix Wars were a nine-year commercial fight, bookended by AT&T's January 1, 1984 release from a 1956 antitrust decree and AT&T's June 1993 sale of its Unix business to Novell. Inside that window, almost every battle anyone today remembers as the Unix Wars took place: OSF versus UNIX International, SVR4 versus BSD, POSIX versus X/Open, lawsuits in New Jersey and California, and a dozen vendor variants from Solaris to IRIX. Almost none of it mattered. The standard everyone eventually agreed on came from outside the fight.
The Unix Wars were a fight over rents. By the time the fighting stopped, the rents were gone.
