https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603

Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.

The Day SunOS Died

"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."

http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html

For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695

There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.)
"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu

Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:

"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...

https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/

I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203

The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186

That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade".
He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.

Maybe Gumby can provide some more context!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c...

Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992

https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c...

The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2

Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.

Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.

To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.