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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Er… what?

GP’s comment should apply to most if not all systems with a few caveats / divergences.

FreeBSD certainly mentions and lists standard sections at the top of `man man`. OpenBSD mentions the concept of categories / sections early on, though it only lists the specific section when it comes around to documenting the corresponding filter.

GNU invented info(1), not man(1).

It is just a pet peeve of mine that a lot of younger pros and devs talk about Linux as though it were groundbreaking, when all of GNU/Linux is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the actual earth-shaking developments, SysV (arbitrary) and BSD. Everything in Linux was there before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye. I remember when most webservers ran NetBSD, and 5 years later Linux took over the data center. Was NetBSD really so intolerable and Linux really that superior? No, its just that with no memory of the past, one can't know any better. Linux really brought nothing new, no new advances, nothing that wasn't there before, and yet it took over like a jihad. That isn't accurate... not like a jihad... it was a jihad. We can thank fanaticism for Linux in the datacenter. I'm not unfaithful, just system-agnostic. Linux was a solution to a problem already solved many times. And since Linux is not original, it sort of gets under my skin when it is insinuated as such. When talking about any software, one should refer to its original development. When we talk about web browsers, we don't talk as though, say, Microsoft invented the web browser, just because it has one; instead we talk about Tim Berners-Lee, not a copy of a copy of a copy of his work.

The main reason Linux outcompeted the BSD-descendants is the GPL license. Instead of competing with proprietary extensions on a free base, fragmenting the ecosystem, upstreaming as much work as possible makes economic sense.

We can still observe that effect in the Android ecosystem which started out really bad and fragmented and slowly drifts into a more coherent whole, instead of the other way around.

Many saw what the UNIX war led to and tended to avoid similar situations. I too liked what the BSD homogenous distribution let to on a technical basis, but the GPL makes sense as long as business cases can be made fit.

Nah the main reason Linux outcompeted the BSD is that it arrived at exactly the worst moment for the BSDs: USL v. BSDi.

This case put a severe pall on the attractiveness of BSDs as they were suddenly in legal jeopardy just at the outset of the UNIX wars and as they were coming into their own.

And at the same moment, a cleanroom unix arrived on the market, limited in many ways but safe.

The GPL was at best neutral for most users, as can be seen from its adoption (or lack thereof). However the GPL was nowhere near as problematic as “AT&T might get our OS declared illegal”.

Yes, there was that, too. Now I did not mean that the license is of crucial importance to most end users (it might be for some, but likely the other way around as some will prefer the simpler BSD clauses). But it was decidedly important for the business and consulting side to form, and that was hugely where Linux won.

Red Hat, Cygnus and the IBM service group took early big bets on Linux, which could not have happened on a product where vendors based their respective offerings on proprietary lock-ins. That drove adoption in banking and defense whose existing UNIX stacks looked increasingly old, which drove a huge industry shift that took the better part of a decade.

It used to be quite common to find people arguing that BSD was the more "business friendly" license, which is may be true in some specific ways but tends to miss the bigger picture. The adoption of a mainstream system under GPL license was important.

Then the situation was probably different in the web hosting business, in academia, and in other sectors where other factors dominate.

What NetBSD did not have was drivers for any old commodity PC hardware which everyone had laying around. That’s it. That’s why people ran Linux on their stuff, and then continued running Linux in the data center.

386BSD the predecessor of Net/Free/OpenBSD was published under a BSD license in 1992. 6 months after Linus posted his kernel sources on usenet. It was free and open source and no later than the "free" BSDs that are still available today. I'd say that is a reason why it is successful.

Edit: "free" in quotatio marks to not confuse with FreeBSD.

Not to mention the GNU project had been around for nearly a decade previous

I fail to see how the comment you are so vehemently responding to in anyway implied that GNU/Linux was somehow groundbreaking. The only mention of GNU & Linux was to clarify that the sections that followed are the man sections on GNU/Linux systems which is appropriate since not all UNIX flavors contain the same sections or the same order of sections. GNU/Linux systems mostly utilize the same sections and order as BSD based systems. SYSV based systems usually have some differing sections and a differing order of sections.

> We can thank fanaticism for Linux in the datacenter. I'm not unfaithful, just system-agnostic. Linux was a solution to a problem already solved many times

And outside the datacenter? Was the problem of an Open Common Desktop OS - for those people who are radically *not* system-agnostic - solved at the time?

What could have been the effects on the trends building the scenario until today and beyond, had Linux not appeared but keeping the rest of the chessboard intact?

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