Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world.
> Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with.
I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM".
I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels.
We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too.
The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking.
That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
> If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.