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A comment on Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed, dominate world today. Parent comment

Re:Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed,... by mr_toad on Friday December 07, 2018 @03:22PM (#18631272)
> Linux is an outlier

Linux was long the go-to OS for cheap servers running on cheap hardware.

When the dominant computing paradigm shifted to large arrays of cheap boxes (map-reduce -> Hadoop -> cloud) Linux was in the right place at the right time.

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Re:Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed,... by laumars on Friday December 07, 2018 @07:39PM (#18633008)
Linux was already pretty big by the time that had happened. Plus it was BSD that was originally favoured as the cheap goto OS by ISPs (before Linux really took off).

Without wanting to start a flamewar, I honestly think it was the GPL licencing that made Linux what it is. BSD was more mature, arguably better designed and was already in use and battle tested. But GPL forced collaboration a little more where and I think that really appealed to hackers.

(I’m not arguing that GPL is better nor worse than BSD/MIT/whatever. I have no strong allegiances with either side of the camp)

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