On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
I just don't think they rewrote as much as they claimed
​ ​
they did,
​​Maybe...
 
it was not a total rewrite, there was more than enough still
there that AT&T could have prevailed with a copyright case.
​I agreed today and I certainly thought so at the time it all went down ( I was scared UNIX for the PC was going to disappear).
But we all never know what would have happened if AT&T had only taken on copyright.   Greed took over and AT&T tried to get everything.  Their exec's make a choice and they did keep the goose, but they killed it too.

Which brings us back to the original question Noel asked:  Why Linux and not another UNIX flavor?

While I learned a great deal in the thread and I think I personally have a better understanding of why different people acted in different ways, the the answer is to me in unchanged and stays a simple two parts:
  1. I think most if not all of us agree it was the WINTEL economics that made the PC/386 the HW platform "win", and 
  2. I truly believe that it was the the AT&T/BSDi legal entanglement that was the key item in Linux end up in the lead
All of the other contributed things people talked about were good reasons for some specific choice by different folk, but the common driver behind it all / the real root of it was the court case.  It did not matter which side you were on and who you thought was right/wrong, held the moral ground etc... if that case had not been there, I really don't think Linux would have gotten the momentum and had the ability to last.

Others may not think so, but too me, that is sad, it was opportunity lost.