alt Hacker NewsThere were already better free options than Linux when Linux first started gaining traction.
The reason Linux grew in the 90s was because it was part of the hacker culture. Not because better options didn’t exist.
Kids liked the fact that Linux was a free-for-all, anything-goes, platform. It wasn’t stuffy like Unix and it wasn’t proprietary like Windows.
Then those kids grew up and became decision makers themselves. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.
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pjmlp • today at 7:15 AM
Which ones? BSD was tied in a lawsuit that left doubts on its future.
Minix was a toy OS for university teachings.
Coherent was commercial.
Nothing else was there on the PC market.
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Actually Linux was very SysV like back in the day, so it was more like the stuffy OS's that people liked.
GCC was the real catalyst, With even SUN which had used bundled dev tools as a early selling point was unbundling them and charging more, many x86 UNIXes like SCO didn't even come with a tcp/ip stack without an extra fee...and you couldn't take C code from HP to another system and actually have it compile.
As Solaris is really just a sysV-ification of the bsdish sunOs...the introduction of posix as a least common denominator, and Linux being closer to the commercial-ish unixes it was just an easier sell for a lot of users.
In hindsight it may seem silly, but in may projects I was involved with, linux using sysV /etc/init.d/, vs BSD's /etc/rc.conf was the driving factor, because /etc/rc.conf was a shared dependency and harder for us to modularize projects.
IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early.
But there were still flavor wars from all sides all the time, and being an ex-op on #unix and #unixhelp from the 1990s, I dealt with them all.
But BSD and heck even ITS etc... was the free-for-all, anything-goes, platform of record.