> I believe that David is right that it was a combination of running on > really low-end hardware (in the early days, Torvalds accepted patches for > just about anything), and a similarly low barrier to entry (others > elsewhere have quipped about having to appease, "the Gods of BSD" to get > anything into those systems) and the AT&T lawsuit, which was at best > misguided but scared people off of BSD.
I always explain it the following way to the non-techies: You've heard of the appstore and how everybody wants to replicate apple's "business model" behind it. Well, it turns out they didn't come up with it. The true inventor was Linus Torvalds. Linux is an "appstore" for bad driver software. Maybe the first time in human civilization where something so broken by design has become the core underlying business plan and gained so much interest to succeed at such scale and against all rationality. Apple had it all easy after this proof of concept. They sold half-ripe hardware, with nearly none of the potential exploited by software, and relied on mostly unvetted third-party submissions to fix that in "apps". Worked for GNU/LINUX, makes apple rich, too. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T3e07bfdf263a83c8-Md44fe279076dffcd1f676ab0 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
