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by barpet
3554 days ago
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Linux did not outperform anyone. Companies did. Companies used and abused linux in such a way that the other simply followed the trend. Mainly because of the costs. And btw this is what Facebook and Google will be doing to most of other competitors as well.
This is pure / chinese style capitalism. We give you something good enough for free but forget about normal wealth distribution only a single entity / group of people will get rich and the others will have to pay a hefty price of loosing their privacy. Linux and Apache and the others succeeded because they spawned a lot of other businesses that were just cheaper than the offerings from Microsoft or Oracle. |
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That's a unfair caricature of what really happened. There were competing systems with business-friendlier licenses. Obviously, Linux wouldn't be what it is without corporate contributions. But it also wouldn't be what it is without Linus' management and extreme pragmatism. That combined with the momentum introduced by the distribution ecosystem and advocacy that sprung up in the nineties.
Don't forget that by the time that IBM started pouring money into Linux (Peace, Love, Linux was in 2001 IIRC), Linux already had a large following among the tech crowd, which was stealthily replacing commercial UNIX installations with Linux.