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And here's me thinking it was just because shared hosting providers didn't have to deal with insane and onerous licensing costs and vm isolation problems

• johannes1234321 6y ago
  That also would have been true for BSD. Linux probably also had good timing while the Unix wars were fought.
  • dekhn 6y ago
    Yep. I remember choosing Linux in '93 because it had a huge momentum behind it (the hacker literally asked me "Linux or BSD" before handing me 4 floppies). I didn't really understand the technical or legal differences at the time, but it was clear that BSD wasn't as "hot". In retrospect I really liked BSD for a lot of the ways it did things (more stable, excellent long-term backwards compatibility).
    • kakwa_ 6y ago
      If I recall correctly, at the time, BSD was stuck in a lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc..... I'm wondering if it had a detrimental effect on adoption of *BSD, and thus increased Linux popularity at this early and critical time.
      • dekhn 6y ago
        Many BSDheads I know from that time believe that was the case (I was asked by them "why didn't you go with BSD" and TBH I just liked the GPL license since I had recently read the section about Stallman in Hackers). I think another issue is that linux added new features rapidly which probably helped adoption.
      • loeg 6y ago
        > I'm wondering if it had a detrimental effect on adoption of *BSD, and thus increased Linux popularity at this early and critical time. Linus has said as much[1]: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." [1]: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html