[jacquesm]

Because of one man: Donald Becker. At the beginning of the commodity super computer era Donald did an absolutely amazing job squeezing out every last bit of performance from commodity networking hardware for 'Beowulf' style clusters.

This gave Linux a head start and the self-reinforcing effects of such a head start did the rest, it made answering the question 'for which OS should we start writing drivers?' for specialty HPC hardware a no-brainer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Becker

[pgtan]

~ $ dmesg | grep Beck

3c59x: Donald Becker and others. www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html

[kelnage]

Sadly that link is long dead, but the Wayback Machine comes to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20000619092736/www.scyld.com/net...