On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
it before it had networking.

Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.

By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that could work on the kernel at a high level of skill. There was no one person who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge because he wrote the whole thing...  BSD was a victim of it's own success in the 80s and 90s in a way...

Warner
 
On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 01:02:20AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
> five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > to free.
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
> > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > >
> > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > >
> > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > >
> > > > FYI.
> > > >
> > > > Arnold
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

--
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat