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by cesarb 1166 days ago
> 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."
2 comments
toyg 1166 days ago
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.

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nortonham 1165 days ago
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.
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johnny22 1165 days ago
was that the case during the referenced time period? I think it's more about back then rather than now.
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nortonham 1163 days ago
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.
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bluedino 1166 days ago
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
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