It's not chance, but it was very likely due to market conditions that have little to do with development methodologies or outright code quality. http://en.wiki

It's not chance, but it was very likely due to market conditions that have little to do with development methodologies or outright code quality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi was hugely crippling at a very critical moment. In a similar vein, PostgreSQL lost out to MySQL in no small part due to: - PHP supported MySQL out of the box. - MySQL was slightly easier to get running. If there's a lesson we ought to learn, it's that market success may be partially or fully disassociated from actual merit relative to other market entrants. We've seen this in commercial software. It would be foolish to think it doesn't apply to open-source.