To be honest, one of the big reasons Linux is successful is it hit in a very narrow window during the USL v. BSD lawsuit where using a BSD distribution was questionable. So it's possble it wouldn't have, and other kernels, like BSD, or Minix, or any of the other kernels which had heavy development before the kernel research winter that we're still trudging through, would have seen the uptake instead. Linux being under an open source license was hardly an interesting thing back then -- Mach, the BSDs, etc were all under various Free licenses. So it could have, it could have not. Linux's success is as much luck as anything else.