Once GNU/Linux started gaining traction I encountered a few sites starting to mix it with their established Sun fleet, and they had been putting GNU userspace o

Once GNU/Linux started gaining traction I encountered a few sites starting to mix it with their established Sun fleet, and they had been putting GNU userspace on all their Sun boxes just to normalize the UX. Solaris from what I recall was opinionated in the BSD vs. SysV department, in terms of what commands were provided on the shell and what their usage syntax was. GNU was more user-oriented and tried to make things familiar to everyone regardless of which camp you were from. So the GNU userspace made more people happy, and the license combined with source distribution didn't prohibit installation everywhere. My memory is fuzzy from that era, but I clearly recall working for a software company writing control panel software to manage apache installs across both Solaris and GNU/Linux, whenever a new Sun box was spun up GNU was immediately installed so everyone could login to any machine and find it behaved more or less the same as they worked at the shell. bash, coreutils, gcc, all the goodies, you couldn't make your x86 GNU/Linux boxes look like Solaris for everyone, but you could go the other direction trivially. Sun was basically user-hostile, GNU makes it very apparent, especially in the transition period.