I too wanted to dismiss it outright, there are some big differences and the first is that simply not that many people really work on Linux.
As I ponder it though, I think it becomes more challenging. Linux' emergence has changed the psychology of the software industry and other industries. You really have to ponder before Linux and after Linux to start to capture the magnitude. Before linux, when you bought a computer you paid a company to make it boot and make it usable. If you wanted to seriously program your PC, you had a relatively small set of options: C, Pascal, Assembly, maybe BASIC and then some like databasey type programming platforms of sorts. You had to pay money to get those tools, not a small amount. You want to look under the hood? Go to a university and maybe that'll scratch that itch. Programmers were the nerdiest of the nerds, now they have a degree of coolness in society (a small one but still some and they make movies about Hackers and stuff.) Things were just very different, Linux and GNU and others have had and made a gigantic and revolutionary impact that really has changed the way software dudes think. Maybe GNU would have done this if Linux didn't show up. Maybe something else would have come along, seems like there is a social component and people were ready for it to happen.
That being said, they barely had computers and landed some dudes on the moon, that was some real fucking cowboy shit. Strapping dudes on to a bomb, controllably blowing it up and launching them to the moon and then bringing them back? Alive, with relatively low casualties. That's really big, a whole lot of people making careers out of that work and a whole lot of luck. The luck makes me think of it as bigger, if we did it 100 more times, I know we would have killed a lot more people in the process and it would have maybe looked a bit more reckless in retrospect.
As I ponder it though, I think it becomes more challenging. Linux' emergence has changed the psychology of the software industry and other industries. You really have to ponder before Linux and after Linux to start to capture the magnitude. Before linux, when you bought a computer you paid a company to make it boot and make it usable. If you wanted to seriously program your PC, you had a relatively small set of options: C, Pascal, Assembly, maybe BASIC and then some like databasey type programming platforms of sorts. You had to pay money to get those tools, not a small amount. You want to look under the hood? Go to a university and maybe that'll scratch that itch. Programmers were the nerdiest of the nerds, now they have a degree of coolness in society (a small one but still some and they make movies about Hackers and stuff.) Things were just very different, Linux and GNU and others have had and made a gigantic and revolutionary impact that really has changed the way software dudes think. Maybe GNU would have done this if Linux didn't show up. Maybe something else would have come along, seems like there is a social component and people were ready for it to happen.
That being said, they barely had computers and landed some dudes on the moon, that was some real fucking cowboy shit. Strapping dudes on to a bomb, controllably blowing it up and launching them to the moon and then bringing them back? Alive, with relatively low casualties. That's really big, a whole lot of people making careers out of that work and a whole lot of luck. The luck makes me think of it as bigger, if we did it 100 more times, I know we would have killed a lot more people in the process and it would have maybe looked a bit more reckless in retrospect.