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While I think a world where BSD would have become dominant would have thrived, things would have been different. Because of GNU existing before Linux, and it never fully adopting Linux as its kernel, Linux has always existed seperate from a specific userland. In my mind, this allowed more variety to be created on top of it (for better or worse). Moreover, Linux' license has encouraged a culture of sharing around kernel components that the BSD license did not mandate.

In an alternative timeline where BSD would be dominant, would we have e.g. free software AMD drivers? Would we have such big variation in containers, VMs, and scalabe system administration as we do on Linux? I wonder. No doubt that world would also be prettier than what we have now - in line with ways in which the BSDs are already better than Linux - but who knows.




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