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Even though I advocate the GPL, I am not convinced Linux was a success because of the GPL. It's more a success because of the amazing determination and maintai
by cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Even though I advocate the GPL, I am not convinced Linux was a success because of the GPL.
It's more a success because of the amazing determination and maintainer skills of Linus Torvalds and the group of enthusiasts that rallied around it in the early days. I have been using Linux (as a user, not a contributor) since pre 1.0 (0.9something on a 486, installed off floppies, fun times.) And it's just amazing where we've gotten to.
Perhaps the GPL played a role in the early day in preventing a parasitical fork by a commercial entity, and by acting as a method of funneling in contributions. Hard to say for sure why Linux won over FreeBSD, though.