A lot of that was not technical, but I think I'd call roughly half of those random. For example, I feel like what Linux did uniquely well was the development p

A lot of that was not technical, but I think I'd call roughly half of those random. For example, I feel like what Linux did uniquely well was the development process. The Linux development process, circa 1995-2000, was unparalleled: - The community was incredibly open and welcoming. Don't let brash and harsh language be confused with being unwelcoming. Anyone could join. - There was thorough code review. Low-quality code was not let in. This was an amazing learning process. - The design decisions were all brilliantly documented on LKML. The quality of discussion there was exceptional. I attribute a lot of this to Linus' leadership, as well as that of lieutenants like Alan Cox. On top of that, you had really robust corporate support in Red Hat (and, for a while SuSE), and an amazing community, package management, etc. around Debian. There were friendly IRC channels for tech support. The social components were super-important. And yes, licenses too: The GPL was the right license to prevent parasites.