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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

> It's just simply frustrating to watch Linux reinvent some wheels, poorly, time after time.

Out of curiosity, why do you think that Linux got such traction and the BSDs didn't? I keep hearing from the BSD camp that the BSDs are better than Linux at, well, pretty much everything, but there must be some reason why BSDs were not as performant for people than Linux distros.

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  Out of curiosity, why do you think that
  Linux got such traction and the BSDs didn't?

The AT&T lawsuit[1] against BSDi. Stymieing BSD in a well publicized lawsuit was enough to put a lot of people off from entertaining an x86 BSD (can't blame anyone for being prudent).

Right around the same time, one Mr. Linus Torvalds was making his own OS.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

Thanks for the info, folks. I was unaware of the lawsuit. Curious.

The lawsuit against involving BSD back in the day was one thing, and another one is... spreading FUD. That's about the fact that BSD's haven't got traction. Of course, relatively to Linux its smaller, or, better say, less visible: Sony Play Station is FreeBSD, Netflix uses FreeBSD for content delivery servers, WhatsApp is FreeBSD, OSX is BSD user land and much, much more, simply less visible.

the first version of Meraki were NetBSD -- same for Apple Airport devices. Junipers management plane has historically been FreeBSD (but that is unfortunately changing)

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