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by api 900 days ago
My favorite explanation for the well known “worse is better” observation about systems software is that it’s a downstream of the fact that worse is free.

There have been vastly superior systems to Unix but with commercial licenses.

1 comments

Unix itself was a commercial system, licensed by AT&T to various other companies, that nearly fragmented itself to death before being resurrected by the free/open variants (*BSD, GNU, and Linux). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
Everything was commercial back then. My point is that mature free implementations of Unix (BSD, Linux) came before free implementations of any superior systems and so they won.