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> I think we need to be more rational about the real reasons Linux is/was so successful. I always think there were two reasons, but one of them didn't matter.

> I think we need to be more rational about the real reasons Linux is/was so successful. I always think there were two reasons, but one of them didn't matter. The first reason, that didn't matter, is that Linux was free. That didn't matter because BSD was also free. The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. By and large I believe they were young developers that often crashed their laptops, and they liked Linux because it booted faster. I honestly believe Linux taking over the datacenter in 2012ish was entirely arbitrary. Booting faster is fundamentally a silly metric in the datacenter. But the takeaway is the change to Linux was driven by developers, not systems administrators, who for the most part were caught with their pants down and complained that Linux wasn't ready (to success in 2006 with IBM, which rolled back their global Linux deployment).

mustache_kimono 4y ago
> The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. Wholeheartedly agree with this, maybe not all your particulars, but yeah agree.
mikem170 4y ago
In the first half of the 1990's BSD was sued by Unix Systems Labs, who had bought the rights to AT&T Unix, claiming copyright infringement [0]. It took a couple of years for everything to be dismissed and settled. "Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers’ ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD’s legal future. As a result, it arguably forged an opening that allowed Linux to gain ground despite being developed primarily by an undergraduate in his Helsinki apartment, rather than a team of professional computer scientists at a major American university." I've always heard that this lawsuit was significant, ruining the momentum that BSD had at the time, momentum that ended up shifting to linux. [0] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-histo...

mustache_kimono 4y ago

> The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. Wholeheartedly agree with this, maybe not all your particulars, but yeah agree.

mikem170 4y ago

In the first half of the 1990's BSD was sued by Unix Systems Labs, who had bought the rights to AT&T Unix, claiming copyright infringement [0]. It took a couple of years for everything to be dismissed and settled. "Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers’ ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD’s legal future. As a result, it arguably forged an opening that allowed Linux to gain ground despite being developed primarily by an undergraduate in his Helsinki apartment, rather than a team of professional computer scientists at a major American university." I've always heard that this lawsuit was significant, ruining the momentum that BSD had at the time, momentum that ended up shifting to linux. [0] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-histo...