> UNIX was a good idea. It was free to spread widely across the tech ecosystem, and eventually some corporate players like Apple and Sun captured a lot of the v

> UNIX was a good idea. It was free to spread widely across the tech ecosystem, and eventually some corporate players like Apple and Sun captured a lot of the value, but Linux stands out as the UNIX “winner” in 2022. Neither the core ideas of UNIX-style operating systems nor the Linux open-source project grew solely because of corporate stewardship. They spread and won because they were good ideas. The author neglects to mention that before POSIX[0], the "core ideas of UNIX-style operating systems" were very much proprietary. For example, there was no easy way to get arbitrary System V[1] or BSD source to easily compile on the other, let alone lesser known Unix variants. So I posit that the ideas spread not due to the merit of each version of *nix, but instead because a standard which allowed (reasonable) portability was agreed upon and largely supported. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V