Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?

jones_supa writes: "One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source software is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success?" Christopher Tozzi has rounded up some theories, focusing specifically on kernels, not complete operating systems. These theories take a detailed look at the decentralized development structure, pragmatic approach to things, and the rich developer community, all of which worked in favor of Linux.

Comments

Stone soup

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

When I was a kid, i read a book called Stone Soup. It was about these guys that wanted to eat, had nothing but a pot. They put in some stones... called it stone soup.

Eventually people got curious, and added things.. the soup became real. Going from water and rocks, to where real ingredients went in, and the stones just fell away. A seed, but then dropped when something real came.

I always thought of Linus as a guy who managed the Stone Soup well. It wasn't specially good in .01 version. But he made people want to add to it. The GPL helped some. Linus chose that license, not as a "hey Im a zealot and you need to give me everything you write" but he thought "if people do cool things they need to let me see their cool things"

That, and FreeBSD had a few handicaps. The biggest one was the AT&T lawsuit. Linus himself once said he'd probably not have bothered with Linux if BSD was clean. The second, BSD had a slower model of improvement. You needed to have the commit bit to do anything constructive. Meanwhile Linus (later Cox) took code from pretty much anyone that made sense. Third, BSD5 had a radical new kernel design that added a lot of complication for threading with little gain. DragonFlyBSD was forked because of this.

So, IMHO, there were a few things... all of them dented (Free)BSD, and there really wasn't another competitor out there.

I once asked Linus about this

[GerryGilmore]

While working at Intel, we had a large Linux conference with Linus and a few other noteworthy OSS dudes. Afterwards, while we were all millng around, I found myself next to Linus Himself and asked this very question. My belief was that it was the GPL vs BSD license which forced all changes to at least be available for inclusion in the next version. Linux felt that it was more of a timing thing where Linux just kind of hit at the right time. Who really knows?

Licensing, mostly

[swillden]

It was because Linux more or less worked, and people could use it and add to it because of the GPL. The competitors all had problems:

* Minix was cheap but not free, and couldn't be redistributed with modifications. People worked around that by maintaining patch sets, but that was even more painful then than it is now (we have better tools now).
* The BSDs were in a quagmire of legal uncertainty and competing claims. Nobody knew for sure if BSD was free or not, so everyone assumed it wasn't.
* Xenix: Not free.
* Microsoft: Are you kidding me?
* SYSV: Not free
* HURD: Didn't work, and had such an elegant architecture that it wasn't clear if it could ever work.

That was the space when Linus Torvalds started hacking around (except HURD didn't even exist yet). If he'd been able to hack on Minix, he would have. But the license prevented it, so he took the opportunity to start his own. Lots of other people saw exactly the same situation and joined him in hacking on something that (a) worked, more or less and (b) they could hack on.

It's not that Linux lucked out and the rest of the competition failed. There was no other competition that satisfied the requirements of being free and hackable. It was also important that Linus was an excellent Benevolent Dictator that gave people few reasons to fork. Actually, on that last point it's rather impressive that Linus is still in charge, even after it's become an incredibly valuable property, used and contributed to by lots of megacorps.

Don't break user space!

[duckintheface]

If you read the Linux Kernel Mailing List http://lkml.org/ for a while, you will see why Linux was successful. Over and over again, Linus Torvalds over-rides the antics of his minions and explains to them (again) that the changes they made must be backed out because they break something that users actually need. Linux is elegant and beautiful, but not just because it's a work of art. Linux is the most functional piece of code in existence. It is the beauty of function.