solaris and derivatives, what is that unix?

[hd77]

the difference between solaris and after projects?


hello
since few weeks im trying to understand a bit the unix* world, except linux that i know since a while.

i discovered the BSD family, now since a little time i hear about solaris, qualified of "unix" on the wiki, instead of unix-like for lot of OSes

looks like it's (not far) of being abandonned, due to the oracle's acquisition of sun microsystems (java, OO.org etc), but several remains :
-oracle solaris, original
-illumos
-openindiana

i have saw on youtube that openindiana have very few application in it's default install (firefox, thun..) plus is a bit slower than common OS..

i'd like to know, in addition of database management (oracle?), in which usages, in the 2000s (or even after), does solaris-like systems, where used to?

thank you

[bsd-keith]

Solaris is one of the original Unix OSes, it was forked as opensource, hence Illuminos & OpenIndiana, further than that I can't say, as I only twice tried to run it as an OS on my machines...

[Onauk]

Originally Posted by hd77

i discovered the BSD family, now since a little time i hear about solaris, qualified of "unix" on the wiki, instead of unix-like for lot of OSes

As far as I understand, UNIX is a trademark currently owned by the Open Group and to be able to call your operating system "UNIX" you need to comply to the UNIX standard and pay the Open Group to review and approve it.

Not many OS want to do this but some commercial software do like Apple's MacOS X which is UNIX certified. And this is why OSes from free software projects are called unix-like and not UNIX.

[bsd-keith]

As an aside - the BSD are descended from the original AT&T in house O/S - as a phone company, they weren't allowed to sell it, so it was cloned by Berkley Software Division (BSD), but there were something like 6 files/programs that had to be re written, because of copyrights, & this is why Linux got a hold, instead of BSD....