On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 8:10 AM David Leimbach via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>
wrote:

> > On Jan 29, 2022, at 8:03 AM, ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote:
> >
> > And I believe that the reason why NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD are not as
> wide spread as Linux was the lack of a compiler suite conforming to the BSD
> license
>
> For some people it’s because they didn’t have a math coprocessor and Linux
> didn’t need one. For others it was the AT&T lawsuit.
>
> I haven’t ever heard the compiler tool chain was a big reason, but I’d be
> interested to hear your perspective here. GCC can produce code of any
> license.


This isn't really on-topic for 9fans, but I find this hard to believe.
Linux used the exact same compiler suite, and became wildly successful
while the BSD distributions mostly stagnated; certainly, the BSDs never
grew at the rate or reached the levels of popularity that Linux has
attained: it wasn't the license on the toolchain.

I believe that David is right that it was a combination of running on
really low-end hardware (in the early days, Torvalds accepted patches for
just about anything), and a similarly low barrier to entry (others
elsewhere have quipped about having to appease, "the Gods of BSD" to get
anything into those systems) and the AT&T lawsuit, which was at best
misguided but scared people off of BSD.

        - Dan C.

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