Free enterprise decides winners and losers based on which provides the overall best performance/price. When you are CIO the CFO always wants to know why you aren't using free software. As CIO the answer is because free is much more expensive. Then you roll it out in his department where it proves your position that spending $76,000 a year for Office is a bargain and I justify my budget. Were that not the case, training would be on the free software.
Several things decided thee FreeBSD and Linux market share. UNIX was for geeks and Linux was the new way to draw attention to yourself as an expert. BSD was in a huge legal fray for years which enabled Linux to grow while the Internet was growing and put pressure on people to make it real. People saw the BSD case which dragged on for years to be baseless. During that time Linux grew as the only alternative. Then Linux wound up in a huge legal fray and everyone was going to be sued by SCO. SCO sold a lot of licenses to prevent from being sued. Novell said they would exonerate anyone sued by SCO. Then SCO sued Novell for course. Then AutoZone, who uses Linux on their terminals refused to pay SCO after which SCO decided to make them a poster child. I wondered how SCO had the guts to do that because Novell had a license with traceable ancestry and SCO was claiming parts that was theirs. SCO would open themselves up to suit by many software developers for damages and I couldn't imagine stockholders going along with something like this unless they were pretty certain. While there was a degree a skepticism after what happened in the BSD case, many business paid for SCO licenses and SCO's business and worth went through the roof. When the claims were examined in the Novell case, it was determine that not only was Novell was the rightful owner of the code, but also that SCO had no rights to the code they had been using. IBM could also be sued by Novell but Novell waived their claims against IBM, who was a partner with them by that time. Novell also stated publicly they had no interest in suing people over any Unix code in Linux and they owned the code and could do as they pleased. Then Novell counter sued SCO for selling their software, along with every other software vendor suing SCO for not paying them when they sold the licenses, plus interest, plus loss of business by undermining Linux. SCO had also sold some IBM code from AIX. The only way that SCO could have gone that poorly against those who sued them after the Novell case is if it was determined deliberate fraud was involved. IBM, SUN SGI, and others were ?NIX shops that weren't going anywhere so they jumped on the Linux bandwagon and donated code. The Linux world was the wild-wild West for quite a while. Novell bought SUSE WordPerfect, Lotus, and all of the apps to put Linux on the desktop and failed. After massive efforts by Novell and IBM and putting together the best of the office suites back then to take the enterprise from Microsoft. Linus stated that Novell was the best thing to ever happen to Linux. While they never even came close because it just doesn't have the technology, a lot of hardware drivers were written. It was good for the entire ?NIX world, including the Apple. It was a free OS that could be tailored so in college you could use it for mechanical engineering automation projects. Some say that VMware is based on Linux but that is totally false. HOWEVER, they did use it as an interface with ESX, before ESXi, AND it uses the Linux API interface design for drivers to make it easy to port drivers to VMware.
When I was using Linux before, it would fall over every time under load. This is why Linux was not used by the big hosting companies like The Planet, iPower, nor as database servers, nor used by banks in SAVVIS. Then is when I ended up on FreeBSD and I'd guess most of the guys that BOUGHT FreeBSD licenses for DirectAdmin had similar experience during the same time frame. Much of the mean time Linux was the wild-wild west every kid having his own version and it being Mickey Mouse. FreeBSD had Ports. However, today, for all intents and purposes, there are only two, Red Hat, and Debian. I'm guessing Linux will handle the loads fine these days, so far I've been happy with dnf, impressed with, FreeBSD support life cycles have gotten a lot shorter, and much of the reason for needing FreeBSD may no longer exist.
