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The UNIX wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix
henceforth. These battles are commonly held to have harmed the market acceptance of Unix and created a market gap that allowed
the rise of Microsoft Windows
NT.
In the mid-1980s, the two common versions of Unix were BSD, from the University of California at
Berkeley, and System V, from AT&T. Both were derived from the earlier Version 7 Unix, but
had diverged considerably. (This conflict was also known as the "UNIX wars" to some degree.)
To resolve this conflict and increase the uniformity of Unix, AT&T and Sun Microsystems (one of the vendors) started work in 1987 on a
unified system. This was eventually released as System V Release 4 (SVR4).
While this decision was applauded by customers and the trade press, other Unix licensees feared Sun would be unduly
advantaged. They formed the Open Software
Foundation (OSF), who released OSF/1, more closely based on BSD. AT&T and another
group of licensees then formed UNIX International. Technical issues soon took a back seat to vicious and public commercial competition
between the two competing "open" versions of Unix.
In 1993, AT&T sold Unix to Novell, who
assigned trademark rights to standards group X/Open. In 1996, X/Open and the OSF merged to form the Open Group, whose
Single UNIX Specification is now the single
standard for proprietary Unix. However, the damage to Unix's market share had
been done.
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