[Blikkentrekker]

And many things that exceed existing standards objectively somehow lost out to exceeding standards or inferior standards coming later. The success of software in particular is about being at the right place at the right time as well as interoperability. Plan9 is generally considered a technical improvement over Unix, but where is it, who uses it? Redox can improve or Unix all it wants on a theoretical level, but it will probably never outcompete it due to interoperability and because of that it won't attract the developers to add the necessary features to compete with it.

Linux in particular started because a student made a task scheduler on his home computer with no real goal to make a Unixlike kernel, and it grew into it and it so happened that at the time there was a big vacuum for a free Unixlike kernel. kFreeBSD and kMinix were not yet free at that time, had they been, Linux would have no doubt stayed a hobby project.