[yjftsjthsd-h]

Linux came into being as a fun hobby project. It was successful because it gained traction with the wider community and got huge commercial backing because it was vastly superior to most of the alternatives from a user perspective ("oh hey, I can run my web servers on this 100% free kernel plus the GNU userland and have a mostly good server for zero software cost on commodity hardware"). But today, Linux itself exists, and while there are underlying technical changes that could improve on it, from an end-user perspective (especially potential commercial backers) anything else would be barely different, if they could tell at all. You'd need some huge compelling advantage - that a user cares about, nicer code and 5 bugs a year instead of 10 bugs a year isn't going to cut it - to actually gain any ground.

[pjmlp]

It gained commercial tracking because it represented a way for IBM, Oracle and Compaq to reduce development costs on their own systems, and thus started sponsoring Linux development efforts around 2000.