From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tytso@mit.edu (Theodore Ts'o) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 18:02:54 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20180206230254.GB1977@thunk.org> On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote: > 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit. At > the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally. At the time of the AT&T lawsuit, most of the people who would be interested in using a Un*x-like system on their personal x86 systems probably wouldn't have been worried about their own personal legal liability. The decision of corporations to use Linux was well *after* the AT&T lawsuit was resolved. The lawsuit have suppressed the willingness of the 386BSD's to advertise what they had --- I had no idea 386BSD was far as advanced as it was, because I didn't happen to have been at that magic BOF where word was apparently passed around on the down low. But that's a little bit different, and more subtle, than just saying "safer bet legally". > 3) Linux got a reputation as an OS you had to be an expert to install, > so lots of people started it to install it to "prove themselves". > This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but > didn't remain true for very long. Something to remember is that in early 90's, floppy disks was the only affordable way hobbiists to get OS's installed on x86 systems. Even OS/2 as distributed from IBM / Microsoft came on 30+ floppy disks. In 1990, CD-R recording system cost $35,000 (and dollars were bigger back then). In 1992, the price had dropped to $10-12k, and it wasn't until 1995 that he first CD-R system under $1000 was available. So I would argue that Linux was *easier* to bootstrap than NetBSD/FreeBSD during that era. The fact that we could shrink a kernel and a root file system down to two 1.44 MiB floppy disks required an on-trivial engineering effort, and it meant that all you had to was to download and write half-dozen to a dozen flopy disks, and then it was *trivial*. In contrast, bootstrapping a BSD system if you didn't have a quarter-inch tape drive (which was $$$) was non-trivial. So I would argue the reverse; the fact that Linux was easier to install may have helped it. > 5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches > didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes > upstream. I'd frame this slightly differently. The fact that we had multiple Linux distributions meant that we had competition to make a better, easier-to-install userspace, while keeping a common kernel. Also, distributions cooperated with each other in a very surprising way. One archetypal story was one where at a Linux meet-up, Bob Young, who was one of the founders of Red Hat, was helping to hand out Slackware CD's because that was what was available. Bob's philosophy was that growing the pie was way more important that fighting over the share of the pie. In contrast, during that era, NetBSD and FreeBSD were busily quarrelling with each others, with politics and ill-will due to people being ejected from the core team which caused the various BSD forks. I can't imagine this being helpful in the long term.... In particular, the kernel engineers who were hired by the distribution vendors were working together on a common kernel, and on low-level userspace subsystems (glibc, PAM, etc.) were also done with a huge amount of cooperation. - Ted