Mike McCarty wrote:
Skunk Worx wrote:
[snip]
Kudos to RedHat for sticking to their guns. Unix predates MS-anything by decades so it's all kind of humorous.
I'm not sure this is true, but even if it were, Linux is not UNIX. What we commonly call Linux is actually Linux (the kernel) which doesn't predate MS products, and GNU, which, as we all know, means GNU is Not UNIX. So, Unix dates have nothing to do with this discussion.
Of course they do. Linux is designed to emululate unix and the underlying technology described in the 1985 SVID interface documentation can't be eligible for someone to patent later. X was working in 1984 and pretty much the current protocol by 1987. In those timeframes, Microsoft's biggest innovations were the 640K memory limit and 32Meg disk limit, along with single tasking until competition from DRDOS 5 forced them to provide equivalent features. Someone should accumulate a list of features that Microsoft has added _only_ after a potential competitor has shipped them just in case anyone could possibly think permitting anti-competitive behavior should even be considered.