I think the suit had alot to do with it. There was no question as to the origins
or legality of linux. It was free, open & mutable. 386BSD was all of these things,
but the stigma of a lawsuit, regardless of merit, can make people question where
they will want to invest their time. Even though linux was not a the same level
as 386BSD when it was released, it was without any questions as to whether or
not your code & work will continue to be fruitful (it's nice to make sentances run).
I believe that linux was at the right place at the right time; before 'hacking' became
some nebulous & mediocre buzz word. Simply ripe for the picking.
On 4/3/06,
lucio@proxima.alt.za <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
> The whole AT&T vs. BSD lawsuit fiasco scared alot of people away from BSD.
Professionals, maybe, but backyard hackers had little reason to care.
I looked at Linux and at 386BSD (and QNX and BSDi) and 386BSD came up
tops. Linux had no graphics (nor had the BSDs) and KA9Q as networking
(so did the Unix PC, a little earlier, that's what I cut my teeth on),
so there was some other factor there that I did not see, then or now.
Crazily, it may have been the GNU licence, but I'm not convinced.
I'll need to ask my Linux guru (CCed).
++L
--
Nietzsche's first step is to accept what he knows. Atheism for him goes without saying and is "contructive and
radical". Nietzsche's supreme vocation, so he says, is to provoke a kind of crisis and a final decision about the
problem of atheism. The world continues on its course at random and there is nothing final about it. Thus God
is useless, since He wants nothing in particular. If he wanted something -- and here we recognize the traditional
forumlation of the problem of evil -- He would have to assume responsiblity for "a sum total of pain and inconsistency
which would debase the entire value of being born."
-- Albert Camus, L'Homme révolté