[prodigal_erik]

I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.

[holdenk]

So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.

Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.