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.