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Happy Birthday, Linus
Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"
How would the world look different? It would be a whole GNU world.
BTW, Linus is 40 today, there seems to be no mention of that anywhere.
Just because of the permissive license?
Partly - commercial BSD derivatives and the BSD networking stack ending up in Windows 95 put off some developers - who wants to see their work being co-opted by Microsoft and other corporations in closed source products? Some people no doubt, but not the majority. Another effect of the licensing was that BSD splintered into different, slightly incompatible commercial forks. The GPL protected Linux from that fate - the free distributions were shipping more-or-less exactly the same kernel code as the commercial distributions - the general perception was that with Linux free didn't mean "less", it just meant "no telephone support". In BSD land, "free" (to many) meant "not as good as what Sun and IBM are selling".
Another factor was that BSD was seen by some Europeans as being controlled by some American labs and American universities. This made it seem less approachable - and harder to get your code into. Linus, in contrast, welcomed good patches with open arms. Linus was highly enthusiastic about people developing code for his kernel. The same enthusiasm for outsiders was not visible within the BSD community.
Yet another factor was the number of Linux distributions that sprung up. Competition is good - Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. were all competing to make the best Linux distribution, and there were numerous other distributions trying to push them from the top. In contrast, BSD was more centrally controlled, and whilst there was some competition between distributions, there wasn't a great amount. Plus the licensing made forks more likely - with GPL and Linux, if someone wrote a good patch, it was highly likely that patch would end up in all Linux distributions fairly rapidly. The same could not be said of BSD and its various commercial forks.