bigbrovars last blog post..ubuntu is taking over – in my work place

Also the hero was a big part of it. I remember when I first got into Linux it was the ease of use and marketing that got me. I hated Unix and BSD was so Unix like. Even though I use the bash shell on Unix and Linux. Simple commands like managing ethernet cards etc are more straight forward to me in Linux and convoluted in BSD and Solaris. Also they are the same in almost all versions of Linux, while the concept is the same on all versions of Unix the commands can be a lot different. Blah.

Also I loved the marketing of Caldera and Red Hat. Caldera was my company before the SCO mess. They had great books, then had great docs included in the box etc (Back in 95, 96) Also they focused more on the regular Windows, Novell end user and administrator. Where as my Free BSD book assumed you were already a seasoned Unix admin, user.

Now that I think about it that was the key for me. To this day installing Ubuntu for instance and installing Free BSD for instance are two totally different exsperences. I can sleep install Ubuntu Desktop and Server. Just as easy as Windows Vista and Mac OS. (SIMPLE) BSD?? Little more convoluted. Also using the ports system is more confusing then using APT.

PC BSD is easy to use and set up. But compare to Ubuntu they have quite a way to go. Also the development of PC BSD does not seem as open as Ubuntu. They have done a great job no doubt but Ubuntu is just much more easy to use and supports much more hardware.

My Acer 3680 laptop runs Ubuntu perfect. Not to take away from other Linux distros but Ubuntu is the only one (8.04) is the only one that works almost perfect.

One last thing. Besides DesktopBSD and PC BSD which are fairly new. BSD’s have never been focused on one thing. Yes BSD makes for a great server but not so much on the desktop. But people tout it for both. Hummmmm.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the Linux platform is not GPL, it’s LGPL. Even the kernel has a special clarification from Linus that userland applications are not considered derivated works, and are thus not required to be GPL as well.

Otherwise many tools that made Linux popular in the beginning would have been unavailable, for example Apache, Perl and PHP. Even KDE would not exists in the current form, for its basic library, Qt, was not GPL in the beginning.

You also forgot a major factor: Timing. BSD was a little bit late to the party because of the lawsuit, that Penguin Pete mentioned. Timing is critical for getting the first mover advantage, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage

The use of the GNU userland must have had an impact – more modern, more user-friendly implementations of all the unix favourites. At the time I had more than one friend state that what they’d really like to see is the GNU userland on a *BSD kernel. As ever – it was the apps, not the kernel, that most interested users. (and given that by then the GNU system was only lacking a kernel, there were quite a few skilled os developers just hanging out to use all of their work, so the kernel had to do nothing but exist to gain an instant following – remember, the os came first, not the kernel).

Solaris doesn’t rate a mention as a `competitor’, since it only recently became free software. It probably did help GNU however, since at the time it was replacing the *BSD variant of SunOS, and so gave a nice modern contrast to the old fashioned bsd.

Well there are other factors no doubt – it was just at the right place at the right time I guess. Cheap PC hardware was just getting feature-ful enough to run real operating systems for example. The internet became available outside of universities allowing easy world-wide collaboration.

Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain
for a pretty good description.

Sorry to pick on one point in a good article, but Joel is right- the phrase “public domain” has a special legal meaning, which in a nutshell is anyone can do anything they want with it, without restrictions. So the way it’s used in the article is definitely not correct.

Nice piece, otherwise, thanks!

Fred