Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.
It's not forgotten, it just doesn't matter in any meaningful way. We're talking about two years of legal issues that took place during one of the fastest moving eras in computer technology. In Linus' own words at the time that this was happening:
"Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
The SCO lawsuit that happened a decade after this is pretty much irrelevant.
And a couple of years later everyone turns their back to the license that made Linux and its userspace in two years happen in first place, it is forgotten.
I think there are many reasons for Linux 'winning', and it's not easy to attribute weights to each one. GPL is probably one, Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.
> Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.
Not to mention being easier to try out (the path to becoming a developer starts with trying it out). Back when Linux was growing, it was very easy to install, to the point of not even needing to repartition the disk; through the magic of UMSDOS and LOADLIN, you could install it to your DOS partition and treat it as if it were a DOS program (with the only difference being that you couldn't "exit" Linux back to DOS without rebooting). From what I've heard, not only was that not possible with the BSD distributions, but also they were more picky about the hardware. That was the path I took: when I wanted a true Unix-like (instead of just playing with DJGPP), I did some research, and concluded Slackware was the best option, mainly because it had UMSDOS and so if it didn't work out, I would just have to remove its directory (of course, once I noticed I wasn't even using DOS anymore, I dedicated a full partition formatted as ext2 to Linux, and later started installing Linux exclusively).
>while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.
The dust was settled then, Google and all were on linux. Compared to BSD era. Not to mention the legal threats were not in the same order of magnitude.
