[kyaghmour]

I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several times in the past) but someone was making the point that open source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to the internet then it was inevitable that people would start sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all those early contributors, but it is food for thought.

Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.

[cesarb]

> Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.

There were other reasons. Reusing an older comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063):

My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this (long) comment I found some time ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338

Some excerpts:

"With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI."

"It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."

"By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."

[toyg]

That was a failure of governance, which was a result of their failure to have an open development model. Linus was very liberal in accepting help from hobbyists and uncredentialed people (people who were hardware-poor, and hence needed support for stuff like dual-booting...), the BSD world has always been more opaque and closed.

In a way it was a victory of horizontal, open, "upstart" governance, versus aristocratic and elitist organization.

[nortonham]

BSD's aren't really opaque. I understand what larger point you're trying to make about the difference between linux and bsd development. But the biggest BSD projects all have mailing lists where you can see the decisions being made, and the source of the core of each one is available to everyone.

[johnny22]

was that the case during the referenced time period? I think it's more about back then rather than now.

[nortonham]

to be honest I can't be 100% sure about that. But each BSD OS is run differently. AFAIK the source of the base of each one has always been open.

[bluedino]

BSD was Unix people used to workstations hardware so that's what they targeted on the PC. Linux was PC people who wanted it to run on whatever cheap hardware they had

[toyg]

The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact that they didn't figure out a governance model that could scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry, BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS, when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is rigidly centralized. Etc etc.

[arp242]

git didn't appear until much much later; and maintainers who can pull in code is not so different than a "core clique" with a commit bit: it's till a relatively small group of people who decide what does and doesn't get merged – it's more of a workflow thing than anything else. Of all the possible factors this seems like the least convincing one.

[retrac]

The "Net" in NetBSD (the first open source BSD community to coalesce after the lawsuits settled) refers to that, it's the network operating system. And not really in the sense of an OS for networks (though it certainly is that) but one from and of the network.

[bcantrill]

I don't know that you were necessarily thinking of this, but I did write a piece on exactly this in 2004.[0][1] I couldn't really find anything else at the time that was talking about this, so if you did/do find something else, I would love to read it!

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/12/16/the-economics-of-soft...

[kyaghmour]

Thanks for this. I'll take a look.