On Saturday 28 October 2006 09:37, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
IBM happened.
why did it not happen to BSD? couldnt be the licence?
Customers were asking IBM for Linux. Keep in mind that the biggest driving factor for IBM was server sales. IBM was basically losing out to whitebox vendors on the basis of price alone. That was due to quite a bit of hype being garnered by Linux (and the fact that newer admins tended to be more familiar with Linux than *BSD).
Inspite of BSD being more complete and useable before linux was being written?. BSD 4.3 (afair) was available for $100 on 30 5.5" floppies ( and ran a whole lot of engineering software in 1988 (afair). (That was why i had written to them for a set of floppies. ) Logically it should have had far more traction than linux inspite of the legal hassles. And it would have made sense for IBM or anyone else to use BSD. But the problem was (imo) the licence. Others could take away your code, screw the market and sit back. Bad for u in the short term and the longterm.
Rgds JTD