> you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why. I think this is a good question, and I was wondering if someone would ask that. To

> you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why. I think this is a good question, and I was wondering if someone would ask that. To be more specific, I think points (1), (3) and (4) are of primary importance, so I would address those specifically: 1) commercial, proprietary and expensive systems were very fragmented and incompatible with each other, especially UNIX, and VMS, Windows etc. Nobody seems to want to go back to that. I think this is the biggest hurdle for any new commercial system to overcome, otherwise Linux (or other, better free systems) will continue to dominate until a better replacement comes along. Look what happened to Solaris. Better than Linux in some respects, worse in some, but it failed to retain its market share. Windows is not hugely used as a server platform either like it was in the early 2000's outside the infrastructure required to support Active Directory, Exchange and Sharepoint. 3) obviously popular server hardware needs to be supported by the system, eg. HP, Cisco UCS, DELL etc. This should be evident by the amount of effort that vendors like Redhat put into patching their kernel to ensure compatibility with hardware from major server vendors. If the proposed alternatives don't support these hardware platforms then they are going to find it hard to gain traction. 4) you aren't going to migrate people away en-masse from a C-based system like Linux without being able to support the major languages and ecosystems that rely on C and/or C++ for their runtimes. People will still need to run their Tomcat applications, Ruby on Rails, Python, NodeJS etc. all of which currently depend on C or C++ to some extent. I think at least Redox is addressing this somewhat with their "relibc" implementation, which would allow "legacy" C codebases to be hosted there in the future, but let's be pragmatic and admit that it's probably a long way off. As somebody who builds/manages emergency services communications platform based on Linux that supports over 70,000 front line emergency services workers, who in turn provide criticial services to over 6 million people, those are the reasons why I see no currently viable platform worth migrating to in the short to medium term _for our particular application_. In addition to self-hosted environments like ours, Linux currently also has a very particular grip within cloud hosted environments as well (which aren't particularly relevant to me at this point in time). In order for non-C based platforms to take off, you either need to support the C runtimes, or be prepared to wait a long time as other languages that don't depend on a C runtime become popular and the ecosystem grows enough.