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by mpyne 11 days ago
The Linux kernel isn't even a monopoly though.... FreeBSD, OpenBSD, heck even ReactOS are all things you can use and make better instead.

No one is forcing you to use Linux any more than anyone is forcing you to use Windows or macOS.
1 comments
inigyou 11 days ago
Great analogy because Windows was officially declared to be a monopoly once.
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mpyne 10 days ago
At the time that may even have been true, there was essentially nothing else for personal computer usage, and there were no alternate form factors like mobile.

But even there the issue wasn't the existence of monopoly per se, but with the (ab)use of the monopoly to also capture the emerging Internet browser market.

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inigyou 10 days ago
Don't move the goalposts. You agree it was a monopoly.
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mpyne 10 days ago
Sure. Until it wasn't.

Even if Linux was a monopoly that would not necessarily be the case for ever, as the example of the Windows monopoly demonstrates. But Linux isn't even a monopoly today.

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inigyou 10 days ago
Linux already isn't a monopoly because it isn't something that is sold. The correct word should be monoculture.
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mpyne 10 days ago
People absolutely will sell you Linux, and they make a lot of money in the process.

I'm not even sure I'd describe it as a monoculture either, if it was that would probably have accelerated its growth even more. Imagine where Linux would be if it were like FreeBSD in having only one distro, one libc, one set of system libs.

You're starting to see it as a server backend lingua franca but even there, there are multitudes. And there remain a great number of organizations that run on one of the BSDs, Windows, old mainframe OS, and so on.

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