> The main reason is that Linux is free of charge, and that Unix happened to be more used in academia. It has little to do with underlying technology.
That's not true, or at least there certainly isn't a consensus about it. One of the narratives that is associated with the rise of Google is the use of commodity hardware and high levels of redundancy. Perhaps this attitude originated from some cultural background like linux in academia, but their rejection of mainframes and the reasoning surrounding it are extremely well documented[1]: "To handle this workload, Google's architecture features clusters of more than 15,000 commodity-class PCs with fault tolerant software. This architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers."
That's not true, or at least there certainly isn't a consensus about it. One of the narratives that is associated with the rise of Google is the use of commodity hardware and high levels of redundancy. Perhaps this attitude originated from some cultural background like linux in academia, but their rejection of mainframes and the reasoning surrounding it are extremely well documented[1]: "To handle this workload, Google's architecture features clusters of more than 15,000 commodity-class PCs with fault tolerant software. This architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers."
[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1196112