The political factors that led to the adoption of Linux as a defacto standard are endlessly interesting to me. As programmers we like to think of ourselves as objective to the hilt, but the reality is that at some point the pragmatic choice is to capitulate to a common standard for the sake of higher-level efforts. In many ways this is purely a political decision because we don't yet see the fallout from the tradeoffs made, and by the time we do it's too late to go back and rebuild the foundations.

We can't go back now and replace UNIX because we've too much invested in it and there's work to be done.