Fair Warning: Long Linux nerd rambling ahead.
I actually was responding to another post where someone revealed to another that Linux is not free of corporate influence. I started to write out this spiraling drawl and realized it had nothing to do with the OP, but thought maybe someone else might find it interesting here.
Feel free to correct me should I have some details wrong, I wrote this off the cuff.
The history of Linux is inreresting, but just remember, Linux “won” in some senses just like how Windows, Apple, Intel, etc. “won” their respective domains. Microsoft “won” corporate desktop and office tooling ecosystems. Apple “won” the consumer computing and personal devices (tablet/phone) ecosystems. Linux “won” the servers ecosystem. And the history of how that happened is just as interesting as the fabled stories as to how Microsoft or Apple came to prominence today.
The only reason new Linux users are sometimes caught off guard by the fact that Linux is highly influenced by corporate entities is because they haven’t looked into the tumultuous and messy, but very interesting, history of UNIX, Linux, GNU, BSD, and others.
What follows is not entirely related, but take this example of how Linux ended up, perhaps by sheer luck, to have ended up as one of the dominant surviving UNIX-like OSes today:
Take the 1992 lawsuit by UNIX System Laboratories vs BSD. One might say, okay, but what does this have to do with Linux? Well Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991. BSD had been around since 1978, and had been gaining considerable popularity during the 1980s. BSD has its own messy history, but the short of the long of it is that Bell Labs allowed UNIX to be utilized, researched, and modified by Universities, which resulted in an explosion of UNIX derivative OSes (distributions), including one Berkeley School Distribution, or BSD. During this time period, the attempts to standardize UNIX by vendors resulted in what came to be known as The UNIX wars. It was in the culmination of these “wars” that aforementioned lawsuit occurred, during which BSD development was ground to a halt (eventually forks of BSD like the ones you see today are the sole inheritors of the BSD family of OSes). This was during the same time the Linux Kernel and the GNU OS would come onto the scene and essentially eat BSD’s cake.
In essence, were it not for the timing of this lawsuit (which you can view as unfortunate or serendipitous depending on your views of BSD vs Linux), we might all be talking about BSD the way we talk about Linux today. Maybe, even then that’s highly speculative.
