Linux’s Remarkable Journey From One Dev's Hobby To 40 Million Lines Of Code - And Counting

A retrospective
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/linuxs-remarkable-journey-from-one-devs-hobby-to-40-million-lines-of-code-and-counting/>
on how the Linux kernel project got to where it is today. Quotes:

    “We're always building on the kernel, despite the fact that a lot
    of things were happening in the world over these three decades. We
    had the dotcom crash in 2000. We had the SCO lawsuit. In 2008,
    there was the global economic crisis. And of course, we had the
    COVID pandemic. But you don't really see an effect on the
    development speed of Linux from any of these events. We have
    somehow managed to sustain everything we can do despite all the
    stuff that has happened in the world.”

    ...

    Of course, for years, no one took Linux seriously. It was
    dismissed as a toy in an era when Unix fragmentation and the rise
    of Windows NT dominated industry thinking. The prevailing wisdom
    held that only large corporations could build operating system
    kernels, leaving little attention for a community-driven
    initiative. Yet, as Corbet noted, Linux exemplified Clayton
    Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation: a technology
    dismissed as inferior that quietly matures until it overtakes
    established players.

Why did the BSDs lose their early lead?

    Another factor, Corbet explained, was that in the early 1990s, the
    BSD Unix systems were much more mature than Linux; they were
    capable of doing more and were more usable. Still, their
    permissive BSD license model led to a whole bunch of forks. None
    of them gained the critical mass in terms of either the
    development community or adoption to dominate Linux.

    Instead, the Linux kernel stayed one thing. It stayed together, in
    part because its GPLv2 copyright policy meant everybody retains
    their copyright under the same license.

Some other open-source projects (including GNU) insist that
contributors sign a “Contributor Licence Agreement”, turning over
their copyright to some official body in charge of the project. The
Linux kernel does not, and there are others that don’t.