If he had not given it away for free, today, nobody would even know what Linux is. It's all about network effects. He was severely disadvantaged because of a late start and no industry connections. There were plenty of competing commercial operating systems at that time. In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX).
Gaining user attention at a global scale is always extremely competitive, even if you give it all away for free.
Some people like Bill Gates got extremely lucky thanks to excellent social connections but others like Linus who were not so lucky had to go to extreme lengths to break through all the social and economic obstacles imposed on them by the incumbents.
Arguably the biggest impact on the early success of Microsoft was the rampant cloning of IBM PCs by third party manufacturers like Compaq, which generated competition that drove down prices and expanded the market for PCs. In that ecosystem, the cloned IBM spec was the "free" part that enabled the network effects.
Gates was smart enough, though, to negotiate a non-exclusive license with IBM.
> In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX).
I don't think there were many (any?) free UNIX or UNIX-like OSs at that time. MINIX wasn't albeit Tanenbaum wanted it accessible to as many students as possible so teh licence fee was relatively cheap compared to other UNIXes of the time. 386BSD (the precursor to FreeBSD and NetBSD) wasn't released until around a year after Linux albeit they started quite a bit before.
I guess there was lots of free OS's in the hobbyist sense but nothing that actually competed with MINIX.
- Born in the US and lived in Seattle; a major tech hub at the time.
- Father was a wealthy attorney.
- Mother worked for IBM.
- His first OS demo for IBM worked the first time even though they had only tested it on an emulator before. This is extremely unusual; there are a lot of factors which can make the emulator behave differently from the real thing.
- IBM did not see the value in software and did not ask for exclusivity (they could easily have demanded it).
Sure he is a very smart guy, but mostly he is a ridiculously lucky guy.
Gaining user attention at a global scale is always extremely competitive, even if you give it all away for free.
Some people like Bill Gates got extremely lucky thanks to excellent social connections but others like Linus who were not so lucky had to go to extreme lengths to break through all the social and economic obstacles imposed on them by the incumbents.