[cross]

Linux won in large part because it was in the right place, at the right time: freely available, and rapidly improving in functionality and utility, and it ran on hardware people had access to at home.

BSD was mired in legal issues, the commercial Unix vendors were by and large determined to stay proprietary (only Solaris made a go of this and by that time it was years too late), and things like Hurd were bogged down in second-system perfectionism.

Had Linux started, maybe, 9 months later BSD may have won instead. Had Larry McVoy's "sourceware" proposal for SunOS been adopted by Sun, perhaps it would have won out. Of course, all of this is impossible to predict. But, by the time BSD (for example) was out of the lawsuit woods, Linux had gained a foothold and the adoption gap was impossible to overcome.

At the end of the day, I think technical details had very little to do with it.

[NikkiA]

In early 1992 I emailed BSDI asking about the possibility of buying a copy of BSD/386 as a student - the $1000 they wanted was a little too high for me. I got an email back pointing me at an 'upstart OS' called linux that would probably suit a CS student more, and was completely free, that week I think it was 0.13 I downloaded that week, it got renamed 0.95 a few weeks later, there was no X (I think 0.99pl6 was the first time I ran X on it, from a yggdrasil disc in august 1992) but it was freedom from MSDOS.

Ironically, 386BSD would have been brewing at the same time with a roughly similar status.

[LeFantome]

I installed 386BSD for my university admin in 1992 I think. They paid my to do it but otherwise it was free. Linux was not yet version 1.0 if I remember correctly.

[NikkiA]

Yes, 386BSD was free, and the precursor to FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. BSD/386 was a different, commercial product though, available a few months earlier.

All 3 projects, BSD/386, Linux and 386BSD gained recognition over the span of about 6 months in 1992.

[LeFantome]

Yes, I know. Interesting that BSD/386 was pointing people at Linux. I guess they knew that 386BSD would eat their lunch. Perhaps they did not see Linux as real competition.

[LeFantome]

I installed 386BSD for my university admin in 1991 I think. They paid my to do it but it was otherwise free.

[pjmlp]

And most commercial UNIXes would still be around, taking as they please out of BSD systems.

[LeFantome]

They are still around. And not taking much from BSD it does not seem.

Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and UnixWare could all use a shot of BSD. I was playing with UnixWare earlier today. Time capsule.

[pjmlp]

They are around, struggling, a shadow of the greatness they once were before everyone went Linux.

Additionally, Apple and Sony have already taken what they needed.