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  • Having worked on several bigish systems I sometimes feel like I have a handle on how development scales. Then I read stories like this. Sheesh. Commented Sep 21, 2015 at 22:22
  • @immibis This was the fashionable thing to do 15 years ago. Even more so, this practice was actually endorsed and encouraged by the leading Unix vendors (SGI and DEC in particular, but IBM too). Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 5:56
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    People tend to forget that Unix used to mean "expensive". Windows won the desktop/workstation war by being cheaper. It's for the same reason that Linux later won the server war. Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 8:33
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    If I want a computer to run software I have written myself, then I want it be flexible and have 101 options how the kernels is compiled etc. However if I am selling software to be installed on the customer’s computer, I want the customer to be running a OS that is not flexible, so that I know it will work on their computer if it works on mine. That was a big factor when looking at Linux as a software vendor - support just looked too expensive. Linux has won the hosted server software wars, where the server is provided by the software vendor – e.g. most web deployed software. Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 8:54
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    @slebetman It's only fair - Unix won the previous "war" by being cheaper (compared to the LISPM's and similar machines). It was absolutely horrid, awfully designed and crashing constantly (but it boots up so much faster than a LISPM! :P), using C as primary programming language (quite a high fall from LISP and similar), but it was much cheaper. In fact, many adopted it because it was free (there's been many free mutations long before Linux). In fact, I've met lots of old-school LISPers who preferred MS-DOS to unixes of the time. Yes, that horrible. Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 13:00