> If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a lot of

> If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a lot of hobbyists starting right from the disklabel, and many of those smug bastards where pretty horrible people to hobbyists. The fact Linux worked on crap hardware meant people who could only afford crap hardware could learn it, and get good at it. Linux overtook Real Unix real fast in-terms of hardware support -- so fast I don't think *BSD ever stood a chance. Stability and quality is a double-edged sword: You think you gotta keep the crap out or it gets crap, but the reality is that crap is what makes it fun, and fun is why people used Linux and not Real Unix. If you want to make something great, you've got to do is focus on things that matter, and remember: fun matters more than scsi. > Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows. Some people say "pure" and others say "inbred". I say this thing you're thinking about is a distraction: anything that prevents people from trying things out is slowing progress, there just ain't two ways around it. Worse is not better: It just means you don't know what's important. Better is better.