[pjmlp]

> I'll just point you to the fact that the internet infrastructure and most of the servers on it, along with every Apple desktop and pretty much every mobile device, run Unix.

I wonder how much of the internet infrastructure would run Unix if free (as in beer) clones like *BSD and GNU/Linux did not exist in first place.

How much internet infrastructure would run actually Unix if ISPs had to choose between Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Digital UX, Tru64 and Windows licenses?

Free is always more valued than quality.

[kelnos]

I'd guess that, even more important than the cost, up until recently, interacting with Windows in a headless mode was next to useless. Most sysadmins in my experience avoid GUIs like the plague when managing servers.

[jamespo]

Are you too young to remember "the network is the computer"?

And of course this worked in reverse, when Netscape released their commercial webserver Microsoft rushed to give away IIS.

[pjmlp]

I started coding in the 80's and I remember how the UNIX market was afraid of Windows NT workstations, before they actually started losing market share to the free (beer) UNIX versions in form of BSD and GNU/Linux.