Well 0.0 barely ran at all, but 0.1 was pretty solid. The big thing was that it was self hosting and by way of the patch kits, forking was not only easy, but inevitable as Free and Net headed in different directions.

What really lead to the widespread adoption of Linux was the incredibly limited release information on 386BSD as Linus had mentioned a few times that if he knew about 386BSD he wouldn't have even started Linux.

But in my opinion it was the combination of BSDi over estimating the odds of annoying AT&T/USL, along with how quickly universities like CMU dumped any/all public BSD work, and the rise of Linux being able to run a GNU user land free and independent of BSD code.

Otherwise most of us would be running "NiHao BSD, orange aardvark" or however it is they come up with distro names.

But I'd say that even though it sputtered out quickly, 386BSD showed that even 2 people could push a free and open OS out into the world via the internet.

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 3:21 PM +0800, "Ed Carp" <erc@pobox.com> wrote:

On Sat, 13 Jul 2019, space aliens made Larry McVoy write:

> I'm a fan of Bill, he worked for me, wasn't work, it was payback
> for what he went through.  Bill and Lynne are unsung heros.

Many people wished they would've released code and fixes more often. That 
was one of the reasons that Linux gained considerable attention over 
386BSD in those days.