> "There's a good reason why Linux absolutely dominates the server space."
Yeah, it was cheaper (in both senses of the word) than all the other contenders and more or less Unixy enough that software could easily be ported over.
Well, not to mention that you're allowed to add features to it without waiting for Microsoft to do it. Linux might not be the best codebase in the world, but it's probably easier to add a feature to Linux than it is to get MS to add a new feature.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux quicker to support multithreading than Windows, largely because big megacorps needed that for their servers?
> "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux quicker to support multithreading than Windows, largely because big megacorps needed that for their servers? "
Surely you jest. The other Unixes, including Microsoft Xenix, supported multithreading before either Windows NT or Linux even existed. Big megacorps in that era used Sun Microsystems ("The com in dotcom™") server and other proprietary Unix servers because both Windows NT and Linux on the x86 hardware of the time weren't considered good enough to handle megacorp server loads and that didn't change until around '00.
If you go strictly by release date, Linux 0.01 came out in '91 and Windows NT 3.1 came out in '93 so it's technically correct that Linux had multithreading first but neither Linux 0.95 (what would have been available in '93) nor NT 3.1 was exactly something anyone would consider using in production, let alone at a megacorp.
Yeah, it was cheaper (in both senses of the word) than all the other contenders and more or less Unixy enough that software could easily be ported over.