Rob Landley argues that a lot of the popularity was due to the fact that the FSF had a high bandwidth FTP site at a time when that was pretty rare, so people we

Rob Landley argues that a lot of the popularity was due to the fact that the FSF had a high bandwidth FTP site at a time when that was pretty rare, so people were willing to sign code to the FSF and license it GPL in order to have access to that distribution method: https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010 https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010 Obviously that particular advantage is no longer relevant.