Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This seems prescient. There were cutting-edge products being delivered on non-commercial BSDs well through the 90s - Hotmail, for instance. But most of those solutions were being delivered on commodity off-the-shelf hardware.

Linux's "killer feature" for adoption may just have been the copyleft license. If device manufacturers had delivered today's generations of single-board computers, networked cameras, Android phones, and who-knows-what else on a permissively-licensed OS like BSD, each of these device trees would have had no mandate to make source available - and as such, I'd bet that any one entity (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc.) maintaining a device tree wouldn't have seen fit to open-source their "trade secrets" in the ARM ecosystem. Which, I'd also bet, would have led to fewer manufacturers adopting noncommercial BSD to begin with, as the "core" distribution would have been less ready to take on new platforms.

It's really hard to say or sure, but personally I think Torvalds' leadership had a lot to do with it as well.

I know the "public image" is one of a shouty twat hurling insults and giving the finger, but that's just part of is style (previous comment: [1]). Overall, he seems quite pleasant and reasonable: someone you can disagree with, and who isn't afraid to say "okay, that's fair, I changed my mind". The general attitude is one of pragmatism, which is not the case for all (high-profile) maintainers out there.

Linux also always had comparatively low barriers of entry to get stuff merged; it's a bit higher now (quite a lot actually), but during the 90s and 00s there was some disdain from BSD folk towards Linux as "anything will get merged". This was not a completely unfair criticism; I mean, we're still stuck with things like ALSA today right? It also allowed Linux to grow much faster however; getting something merged to BSD involved a lot more review/effort. It's a trade-off.

Stability and "we never break userland" is another important piece, again, driven by Linus.

Also, the FreeBSD 5 release was kind of bad. They changed a lot of internals, and it was far less stable than FreeBSD 4. I never had any problems on 4, but 5 had an alarming number of freezes and the like. This was mostly fixed in FreeBSD 6, but it turned a lot of people off.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815088

Reply on news.ycombinator.com