Indeed and it was stuck in a legal battle with AT&T, while commercial UNIXes and Windows NT, were adopting stuff out of it thanks license.

Had Linux not happened, most likely I would still be deploying Solaris into production.

That's an absurdly bold claim even by your standards. You can't predict how the industry might have evolved without Linux -- there's far too many variables. But even if you were to try, the fact that FreeBSD, OpenBSD and others are still thriving while Solaris is slowly dying off should be a massive clue that your statement isn't nearly as much of a certainty as your post makes out.

Good to know now I have standards to be measured against.

Solaris is dying because of Linux coming into the scene and Sun's mismanagement, being bought by Oracle that most cares about Unbreakable Linux, this wouldn't have happened in an alternative universe without Linux.

Plus it was only one example of UNIX, others could be given that were affected in similar ways.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD and others are surviving, hardly getting any upstream changes from Apple, Sony or plenty of others that take profit of the license, beyond some charity whenever they feel like, this isn't thriving.

It is no surprise that all POSIX clones competition against Linux on the IoT space, by those vendors not keen in upstream updates for Android, are using MIT/BSD and Apache licences.

Maybe this isn't up to my standards, yet it is what I believe.

> 386BSD (of which FreeBSD is based) is an independent lineage to GNU and was released under the BSD licence. Thus also independent to GPL.

Is there a non-gnu c compiler? I could only find: https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/2.0/usr/src/usr.bin/gc...

People tend to forget that Linux was a small project that provided a gpl kernel for the GNU system - not the other way around (hence GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, GNU/kFreeBSD etc).

I don’t think anyone in this thread would have forgotten that fact. The Op themselves mentioned Hurd (what was and still is intended to be the GNU kernel) so they clearly weren’t obvious to your point.

The desire for a non-gpl compiler is part of what drove the development of llvm. llvm is the default compiler on FreeBSD. Compilers are hard, and it took a while.

> Those hackers then grew up, got proper jobs in IT and continued to use what they were already experienced in...Linux.

Honestly by the late 1990's Linux was what was being requested by a lot of employers, with Solaris being the most common system it was displacing (in my experience). BSD simply wasn't even on the radar for most employers/employees.

The "late 90s" is ~8 years after Linux's release though. So well within the time frame for uni students to have grown into hiring managers.