It kinda did though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation !
The corporate support you mentioned arrived years after that.
But creation only counts for so much -- without support, Linux could still be a hobby project that "won't be big and professional like GNU"
I'm saying Linux didn't APPEAR out of thin air, or at least it's worth looking deeper into the reasons why. "Appearing" to the general public, i.e. making widely useful software, requires a large group of people over a sustained time period, like 10 years.
----
i.e. right NOW there are probably hundreds of projects like Linux that you haven't heard of, which don't necessarily align with funders
I would actually make the comparison to GNU -- GNU is a successful project, but there are various efforts underneath it that kind of languish.
Look at High Priority Free Software Projects - https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
- Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
- Real-time voice and video chat
- Internationalization of free software
- Security by and for free software
- Intelligent personal assistant
I'm saying that VIDEO CODECS might be structurally more similar to these projects, than they are to the Linux kernel.
i.e. making a freely-licensed kernel is aligned with Red Hat, Intel, Google, but making an Intelligent Personal Assistant is probably not.
Somebody probably ALREADY created a good free intelligent personal assistant (or one that COULD BE as great as Linux), but you never heard of them, because they don't have hundreds of companies and thousands of people aligned with them.
It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).
I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.
Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.
You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux development is funded by the same kind of companies that fund MPEG development.
It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and now MICROSOFT itself (the competitive landscape changed)
This has LONG been the case, e.g. an article from 2008:
https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/linux-contributor...
2017 Linux Foundation Report: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-fo...
Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git made detailed tracking possible
The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas and Mellanox
---
curl does seem to be an outlier, but you still need to answer the question: "Who would develop video codecs?" You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.
Linux has funding because it serves the interests of a large group of companies that themselves have a source of revenue.
(And to be clear, I do not think that is a bad thing! I prefer it when companies write open source software. But it does skew the design of what open source software is available.)