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by ripdog 1812 days ago
IMO Linux won because its license forced everyone who used and extended it to open their changes - this changes the calculus for firms building products on Linux to make it more worthwhile to upstream their changes to reduce their local maintenance burden.

Compare this to something like the playstation 4, which used freeBSD as the base of their OS, and contributed nothing back to the project at all.
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Jasper_ 1811 days ago
Linux "won" because SGI very loudly shit the bed and betting on Itanium, taking IRIX with it, DEC was in the process of making the future of Tru64 very confusing with the Alpha, a computer that didn't support their flagship OS, and HP was EOLing HP/UX because they bet everything on IBM's OS/2 Warp.

The only big UNIX vendor left was Sun Microsystems, and Solaris indeed dominated the 90s dotcom era. Everybody was running SPARC and SunOS servers.

It wouldn't be until the mid 2000s when Linux started picking up the pieces left behind after Red Hat started their server product and certification program.

For a long time, Linux was strictly a hobbyist OS. It later dominated by simply being the last one standing after everyone else fell.

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mcguire 1811 days ago
The true competitive threat to the Unix vendors wasn't each other, it was Microsoft.

And "for a long time" was actually a fairly short time. Linux began to approach feature-comparability fast, and ran on PCs, not $10,000 workstations (that were getting beat power-wise by PCs).

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cortesoft 1812 days ago
This seems a bit of a chicken and egg problem... why would the early adopters have chosen Linux, before others had been forced to contribute back their changes? The first company to adopt it wouldn't have received any benefits, only an obligation. Why pick it over BSD?

I think there were likely other factors that made it win out.

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ripdog 1812 days ago
Oh, for sure. There are always other factors in the real world.

But I think that's the main one that allowed Linux to snowball ahead of the other Unix(-likes).

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ric2b 1805 days ago
They would also get the "promise" that the system they were betting on would also get contributions from other companies, making a safer long term bet.
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mcguire 1811 days ago
And because the GPL makes it difficult to fork and make the branch a proprietary product.
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