The problem is a lot of what Sun brought to the industry is now in the Linux arena. If Sun survived, would Linux have happened? With such a huge development infrastructure around Linux, would Sun really add value?
Linux is not better than Solaris. It was, however, circumstantially more affordable, more attractive, and more exciting than Solaris at the same time. They’ve made a lot of strategic mistakes, but those were in the context of having some vision.
I mean this to say that the “huge development infrastructure around Linux” is bigger, but much less efficient than that of any of BSDs, and than that of Solaris in the past. Linux people back then would take pride in ability to assemble bigger resources, albeit with smaller efficiency, and call that “the cathedral vs the bazaar”, where Linux is the bazaar. Well, by now one can see that the bazaar approach make development costs bigger long-term.
IMHO if Sun didn’t make those mistakes, Solaris would be the most prestigious Unix and Unix-like system, but those systems would be targeted by developers similarly. So Linux would be alive, but not much more or less popular than FreeBSD. I don’t think they’d need Solaris to defeat all other Unix systems. After all, in early 00s FreeBSD had SVR4 binary compatibility code, similarly to its Linux compatibility code, which is still there and widely used. Probably commercial software distributed in binaries would be compiled for that, but would run on all of them. Or maybe not.
It’s hard to say.
But this
The Linux world figured out a different balance where the industry is above and beyond individual companies and doesn’t require profit
is wrong, everything about Linux that keeps going now is very commercial. Maybe 10 years ago one could say it’s not all about profit.
The point is the industry is not a profit driven entity, but has room for many profit driven entities.
That’s like saying your body is not a protein driven mechanism (cause there are many other things involved), but has room for proteins.
If somebody tears out half of your internal organs, you die.
If profit-driven companies stop participating in Linux, Linux dies. Today’s Linux. Linux of year 1999 wouldn’t.
That’s how even gifts can be the needle to control you.
I mean, why is this even a point of contention. BSDs played safe in terms of politics, Linux gambled by not considering the dangers. BSDs grew more slowly, Linux took the bank. But now Linux is confined by the decisions made back then. BSDs are more free.
