Warp wrote:
>   But nowadays eg. Solaris is free too, and should be quite robust (as it has
> a long history precisely in server environments). Also the different BSD
> variants (but especially NetBSD, if I have understood correctly) are of
> quite high quality (especially in terms of security), especially for server
> environment.

Oh, I think those get used also. You could argue that the BSD variants are 
driving Apple's server clusters, for example.

Plus, people using Solaris or BSD don't necessarily tell you they're doing 
so. I've often heard "We use X inside our product, but we don't tell people 
that because it's a competitive advantage."

>   Maybe it's because Linux has the most polished distributions which minimize
> the amount of setupping and administrative work?

It could be that.

It could be that Linux is more friendly than Solaris or BSDs to people doing 
significant improvements and incorporating them into future releases. For 
example, if Google releases a "fall over from master to slave replica 
without stopping the server" improvement to MySQL, it likely it gets into 
future releases. That doesn't necessarily happen with MS SQL Server. I would 
suspect the same is true of improvements in Linux.

Basically, it's a network effect. Everyone uses Linux because that's what 
everyone knows in detail. It's good marketing, somehow.

When Google talks about map/reduce, someone implements it on Linux within a 
month. I don't know why they picked Linux, but probably because they already 
had Linux yadda yadda. So it's the same "unjustified" network effect you get 
with Windows - people pick Windows because everyone they know uses Windows. 
OS geeks hack on Linux because Linux is the platform where all the OS geeks 
hack. Computer nerds move to Silicon Valley because that's where all the 
other computer nerds live, which means there's nerd jobs to choose from, 
which means there's a big bunch of nerds to choose from, ...

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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