21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
9:15 p.m.
On 2/21/17 7:02 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
So there is a question here, though, and I'm
curious to see what others who
were closer to the action think. Why _did_ Linux succeed, and not a Unix
derivative? (Is there any work which looks at this question? Some Linux
history? If not, there should be.)
It seems to me that they key battleground must have been the IMB PC-compatible
world - Linux is where it is now because of its success there. So why did
Linux succeed there?
Was is that it was open-source, and the competitor(s) all had licensing
issues? (I'm not saying they did, I just don't know.) Was it that Linux worked
better on that platform? (Again, don't know, only asking.) Perhaps there was
an early stage where it was the only good option for that platform, and that's
how it got going? Was is that there were too many Unix-derived alternatives,
so there was no clarity as to what the alternatives were?
I was there at the time (bash was the first thing Linus ported to Linux)
and I have to say it was the combination of the availability, since the
BSDs were still encumbered, the accessibility, since its hardware demands
were very modest, and the FSF's enthusiastic porting of all the GNU apps
to it. It was the perfect student/starting system for the time. You can
talk about lost opportunities, but it was the right system at the time,
and I say this as a BSD guy from way back.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/