Did Linux kill commercial Unix?

Re:Did Linux kill commercial Unix? by ggm on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:40PM (#21219907)

I would say Intel and AMD killed alternate CPU architectures. Linux was the knife, but the arm (sorry) wielding the knife was the instruction set.

ARM destroyed the others in the mobile platform. If linux hadn't existed to become Android, I am sure some other general purpose OS would have filled the void.

VX works was not capable of doing this. Nor was OS/2. So in some senses, yes, Linux was necessary. Why SPARC or MIPS didn't persist as a major component of worldwide platform lies in questions around how they were targetting size, cache, speed, die yield. Perhaps if Sparc had been spun off as an independent foundry it could have succeeded but I suspect Solaris wasn't heading to the pricepoint where it worked for a killer-platform.

So maybe the meme is "price killed commercial unix"

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Re:Did Linux kill commercial Unix? by bifrost on Friday October 11, 2019 @12:10AM (#21221486)

MIPS is almost literally everywhere, its in most IoT devices...

NetBSD for Sparc has existed since 1993 or so.

OpenSPARC has existed since 2005 and multiple operating systems have run on Sparc since the 90s.

Linux gained adoption the same way OSX did.

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