> 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.