Thought Experiment: What If Linux Never WAS ! 3776
Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. "The Alliance, a coalition of organizations from...
The BSD developers were snobs at the time, which also helped Linux. The Linux developers were interested in getting Linux working with hardware people had, whereas the BSD developers felt that if you wanted the privilege of running BSD, you could go out and buy new hardware. This greatly limited the number of people able to run BSD.
For example, consider CD-ROM support. Long after Linux had support for the CD-ROM interfaces that were included in many popular soundcards, and for IDE CD-ROM, BSD was limited to SCSI. At the time, a SCSI CD-ROM was about 4 times the cost of an IDE CD-ROM. For a device that you are only going to use when installing the system, it's not worth SCSI.
In a state controlled country, "People Ready SoftwareŠ" takes on a whole new Orwellian meaning. With Google and Yahoo supplying restricted search engines, Cisco supplying internet backbone connections with extensive sniffing...
Or consider disk parbreastioning. Linux would coexist with Windows well. You could easily set up a dual-boot system. BSD, however, did not support this at first. The reason they gave had something to do with how you could not 100% always deduce the drive geometry that had been used when Windows had set up the parbreastion map. Well, technically they were right. Using, for example, the algorithm given in the ANSI CAM specification, you could only get it right something like 99.99% of the time in theory (and 100% of the time with the parbreastion maps Windows actually made). So, Linux worked always, and BSD didn't even try. If you wanted to run BSD, you could damn well dedicate a whole disk to it, according to the BSD developers.
So...Linux or BSD? Linux would run on the hardware you already had, without requiring you to give up Windows. BSD wanted you to buy new hardware and dedicate it fully to BSD. Of course Linux ended up being way more popular.
-- --Tim Smith