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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

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> Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

From the horse's mouth:

> Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.

- https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html

That's what I was thinking too: when Linux was released there was no viable Unix-like OS for the current day PC machines.

Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".

I suspect that if Linus had tried to actively contribute to BSD he might have gotten fed up and done his own thing anyway.

I think Linus would have forked it and made LinBSD and more people would have joined his effort. The Linux community was a lot more friendly and helpful to me than the BSD crowd in the mid 90's

The bsd community is still ups and downs today.

Not all the bsd communities are equally friendly.

I've talked with a lot of people about this. The general opinion is that it was a combination of lingering concerns from the AT&T lawsuit and, perhaps more controversially, a somewhat difficult to engage with community. However, most of the same people also think that, had Linux not happened, BSD in some form would have occupied the space that Linux came to.

I did a series on this and related questions a few years back. (Podcast and transcript) http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-source...

BSDI was legally in the clear in January 1994 and FreeBSD had an unencumbered version out by the end of 1994. Linux distros were still toys at that point. I think it's fair to say that the lawsuits didn't help BSD, but the lawsuits don't seem like they should have been a decisive reason for Linux overtaking them in mindshare and marketshare.

FreeBSD didn't support shared libraries while Linux did, and that made a huge difference trying to run X11 on the 386 systems of the time, specifically because of hard disk space required.

linux's shared libraries were pretty limited in '94- I forget the technical reason but it had to do with runtime linker not being able to compute unique addresses for each .so, and so they sort of had to be assigned "ranges" that a particular .so owned (https://www.linux.co.cr/free-unix-os/review/1994/0914-a.html). Probably a.out vs. ELF.

Yup, that was the limitation of the old a.out format. ELF was a breath of fresh air, but it didn't arrive until after Linux 1.2.

> Linux distros were still toys at that point.

I had Slackware 1.1 running in 1Q94. It had X11 and you could run Mosaic on it plus all of the shell userland. It was pretty usable.

I installed Slackware 2.1 in the fall of 1994. I had everything working. X11, networking, sound, Mosaic. I compiled Spice 3f4 and used it for my EE circuit sims.

The next year I asked some questions on a FreeBSD usenet forum and was told to buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, and new network card. No thanks. I just stayed with Linux because the hardware support was much bigger.

I wasted so much money on SCSI back in those days. This was the thing that finally killed it for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive

I ended up buying a SCSI card in fall 1995 so I could use this. The drive was about $500 but each 650MB cartridge was only $30. I could format it with a ext2 and use it as a regular filesystem. No need to make an ISO image to burn. CD burners weren't cheap yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual

This technology was later turned into DVD-RAM which was never as popular as DVD+/-R(W)

Linux wasn't a toy in '94: I had a full X11 with emacs, g++, and all the other goodies and easily ported scientific software from the grown-up UNIX in the lab, using it to write my undergraduate thesis. This was using Slackware from 4 floppies. At the time I was offered two pills: Slackware or BSD. I picked linux since it sounded "newer and hotter".

It was a toy in '92-93 and they still didn't have good dynamic linking in '94, and I'd argue things were pretty dicey before glibc (I stopped using debian for years during the bo->hamm transition) but it was usable for production work at the time.

(none of this should be taken as a statement that BSD wasn't in great shape in '94; I had heard of the lawsuit but I don't think it affected my decision to go linux at that time)

'94 it was definitely not a toy, but certainly needing a lot of work from the user. But to me (at the time), that's also what made it so much fun. Recompiling the kernel every single weekend. Big part of my childhood.

What an interesting question!

I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative.

So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.

>because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me.

Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.

It's not really a matter of Linux or BSD "winning" in the 90s. It wasn't the kernel and base system that was super important but what you could run it on and what you could run on it. A Free Unix(like) was an important base component but went hand in hand with FOSS software running on top.

With the likes of Apache and Samba PCs running Linux (or a BSD) could replace many thousands of dollars in software licenses for server products for zero licensing dollars. It didn't really matter if the base OS was a BSD or Linux, as long as the services ran on top on relatively inexpensive hardware it was a massive win for a lot of organizations.

IIRC, the BSD lawsuits were mostly about userspace stuff, ISTR the kernel was known clean. I wonder how big the license incompatibility was thought to be at that time to prevent releasing a BSD with a GNU userspace. I don't even know if the GNU stuff was complete enough.

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