alt Hacker NewsThanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link:
"De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal."
There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened.
However, I think Linux has always has and till today has better leadership, and management compared to OpenBSD.
I also think GPLv2 was another good that happened to Linux. It just creates an irresistible force to contribute back. With *BSD, a company might contribute back or it may not.
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I never believe people when they say, we would have been famous if not for one piece of bad luck 35 years ago.
Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.
It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and never looked back. Which is not solely a license issue; you can definitely release GPL software for FreeBSD, but the "license war" culture (to the extent it really existed) may have been an issue.
And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.
Ha! That’s some rose-colored-glasses view of BSD history.
The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.
It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.