Linux - a disruptive technology? (IT Pro)

Pretty much how I feel. Plus the disruption started way before the GPL and BSD licences were
drawn up - take the public domain field, for example.

But even that's just peanuts because the *real* disruptive force was the sudden steep increase
in the ease of distribution and collaboration introduced by the rising popularity of the
Internet. 

The GPL and BSD licences were merely the grease (and had they not been drawn up, something
similar would have been in their places as the public domain field was heading in that
direction), and free-of-charge operating systems, compilers and applications becoming more
common-place was just an inevitable consequence of that.

Survival-of-the-fittest kicked in, so Linux became the most popular free-of-charge operating
system, and gcc became the most popular free-of-charge compiler. But again, if neither of them
existed, something else that was similar would have taken their places.

So it really is just evolution rather than revolution, catalyzed by the increasing popularity
of the Internet.

I couldn't agree more. Also, the popularization of the Internet has played (*is* playing) a
very important role.
Sites like this very one often mark the difference between a thriving ecosystem/community and
a dead project.

Windows NT was a decoupling the server software from proprietary integrated systems that the
Unix vendors were selling, so that you could run your servers on commodity PC hardware. I
agree with you that that *was* part of a huge disruption in the computer industry at the time,
but it was part of a wider trend towards PC hardware. You could just as easily have said
Novell was the "disruptive technology" as it was doing the same thing Windows NT did, in that
respect. And in fact, Linux was part of the same wave.

It does seem like a lot of Unix refugees ended up in the Linux camp, and that's not all that
surprising, but I'm not sure how many were ever driving the push towards Linux (with the
exception of obvious team-jumpers like Mad Dog). I recall armies of Sun (mostly) bigots
mocking Linux as not being a "real" Unix and being an OS for cheap PC crap. Also if you look
at the industry today, most of Linux' dominance has occurred at Unix's expense. Windows has
grown in the server space, of course, but Linux has grown exponentially by ripping through the
areas once dominated by Unix. This is a matter of Linux AND Windows, as PC operating systems,
riding the wave of PC dominance.  

And anyway, Microsoft certainly marketed Windows as being easier to administer, and that
probably helped it eat into the Unix market share, but I've not found it to be true. I think
it takes a different set of skills, more troubleshooting. To set up Apache, for instance, you
may need more of a conceptual understanding of the way the web works, but to make IIS work for
you, you have to figure out that you need to go to the admin console, click on a poorly named
tab, click a button to open a new window, flip to the second tab of that window and click a
poorly-labeled checkbox, all by using google to root around the poorly-organized compost heap
of documentation on MSDN.