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I mean, if you look at commercial UNIX, well to start it all sources from AT&T at some point; they weren't permitted to sell it, so they gave it away more or less.

BSD (and others) took it and improved it.

Everyone (including Microsoft) took at least the BSD socket stack, at least for a while.

Commercial UNIX competing against free community UNIX is a hard battle to win. There's a question of UNIX vs alles, but if UNIX lives, it's going to be community UNIX (or well Linux which is community UNIX alike).

I suppose there's an angle for commercial UNIX on specialized hardware; Apple is doing fine with that model; but it stopped being compelling for Sun --- commodified x86 servers are good enough that you can't build a business to support commercial UNIX on specialized server hardware (x86 or not) alone. Oracle Solaris exists, but as a non-customer, it looks like development has slowed significantly.



I know of one total rewrite.

"I couldn't find anything that was copied." -Dennis Ritchie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)




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