What do you make of Linux’s success? Is it proof of the power of hackers in the bazaar? Or was it simply a matter of fortunate circumstances? Will there ever be another open source success story as big as Linux?
When looking at Linus’ success, I like to bring up a quote by Peter Thiel:
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
I think this quote goes well with the story of Linux. I mean sure, there are a lot of great fast paced open source projects, but Linux and Linus won’t ever happen again. Even if the project with the new rust kernel gets written, it’s going to be it’s own unique thing.
MVP done right
People talk about Linux like it sprang fully-formed out of the void and won an OS beauty pageant. It didn’t. Linux was a kernel. That distinction matters because the early “product” wasn’t Linux alone, it was Linux + a pre-existing ecosystem that was starving for a kernel-shaped anchor. GNU had a lot of the userland pieces for a Unix-like system, but its kernel (Hurd) wasn’t ready, which meant there was a gap big enough to drive a 386 through.
That’s why Linus’s original post feels so small and so lethal in hindsight. “Just a hobby… for 386(486) AT clones.” It reads like a bored student asking for feedback on a weekend project, not like a founder announcing a category-defining platform. Today, so many founders make this error. They announce their project to the world with all their bells and whistles and yet those products often suck way more than the founders who release an unfinished version on some random forum instead of linkedin.
Linux succeeded because it was available at the exact moment a ton of competent weird people were ready to pile in. Not because it was inevitable. Not because it was marketed. Because it existed, it ran, and it gave hackers something real to touch.
The four kinds of luck
Calling Linux “just lucky” is like calling a rocket launch “just good weather.” Weather matters, but someone still had to design the rocket, fuel it, and press the button. Marc Andreessen loves to push the idea that “you make your own luck”. He leans heavily on a framework that breaks luck into four types:
Chance I: blind luck
Completely uncontrollable randomness. Right place, right time, no credit.
Chance II: luck from motion
Luck that appears because you are moving, building, talking, trying lots of things.
Chance III: luck from a prepared mind
Luck that only looks like luck from the outside. You are so steeped in a field that you notice opportunities others walk past.
Chance IV: luck from your uniqueness
Luck that finds you specifically because of who you are, how you think, and the strange combination of things you do.
Got you, let’s pin each kind of luck directly to Linus and Linux, clean and short.
Chance I - Spawned On The Right Map
Linus was born at the right time and into the right technological backdrop.
He hit adulthood in a world where Intel 386 boxes were getting cheap, powerful and widespread, which meant a hobby kernel for that chip could suddenly matter to a lot of people. At the same time, the internet was just mature enough that a student in Helsinki could post “just a hobby” on comp.os.minix, upload code to an FTP server and have it pulled globally. GNU had many userland tools but no finished kernel because Hurd was still grinding along, which left an unclaimed slot for “free Unix-like system that actually boots on real hardware.” Linus did not earn any of this backdrop, he simply arrived on a map where a small personal project had an unusually high ceiling.
Chance II - Shipping His Way Into Serendipity
He posted a lot and kept the project in motion.
Linus was not quietly fantasizing about operating systems, he was hacking on Minix, learning Unix internals, building his own kernel for 386 and talking about it constantly on public mailing lists. Each time he dropped a new version, asked for feedback or complained about Minix, he increased the probability that some annoyed or excited expert would notice, try it, patch it or port something to it. The “lucky” inflow of contributors from the Minix community and beyond was the statistical result of that constant visible motion, not an accident that landed in his lap while he was idle.
Chance III - Seeing The Gap Others Walked Past
He was prepared enough to recognize that a toy kernel could plug a global hole.
By the time he started Linux, Linus already understood Unix culture, Minix’s limits and the kind of system he personally wanted to run on his 386. In parallel, the free software world had an almost complete GNU environment but no working kernel, and commercial Unix was expensive and closed. Lots of people knew these facts separately. The “prepared mind” part is that Linus saw they could be snapped together if someone shipped a real, hackable kernel with the right license for commodity hardware. From the outside it looks like luck that his hobby project became “the” kernel for that ecosystem, inside the story it is exactly the kind of opportunity that only registers if you have already internalized the landscape.
Chance IV - The Linus-Shaped Gravity Well
He ran Linux in a way that created its own stream of opportunities.
Over time, the project did not succeed only because it existed, it succeeded because it was run with a very particular mix of openness and hard-nosed control that was tied to Linus himself. The strong maintainer model, the willingness to say no, the public technical arguments and the bias toward practical performance created a culture that serious kernel hackers and eventually serious companies trusted. That personality-shaped governance attracted more contributors, more hardware vendors and more downstream uses, from servers to Android, which in turn reinforced Linux as the obvious place to send new work. At that point the “luck” was no longer just about being on the right map, it was about occupying such a distinctive niche that important opportunities started to route themselves through him and his kernel by default.
The next big thing
At the end of the day, I think there is a sort of mental exhaustion that media has convinced us exists. The next big thing. The next thing that makes everything obsolete. I am tired of trying to search for it. I am tired of hearing about it. The more you chase it, the more everything starts to feel like a product pitch for a future that never quite arrives.
Writing software is fun. That is why I do what I do. It is enjoyable seeing the users smile. It is fun seeing the hackers poke at it. It is human to make mistakes and leave funny messages in the comments. It does not have to be perfect or big. Eventually, the best projects will get the attention they need. For now, I like the small, performant and underrated. I hate bloated and slow. I just want people to smile more as they use some of this software instead of sitting there staring at an AI chatbot while it gives its neutral opinion.
Linux did not begin life as “the next big thing” either. It was a small, opinionated kernel written by a student who wanted something better on his own machine. It grew because it was useful, because it made hackers curious, because it kept getting a little bit better with each patch. Only much later did people turn around, point at the fully grown system and declare it a miracle. From the inside, it was just a long sequence of “this is fun, let us try this” moments.
So I do not really care whether there will be “another Linux” in the mythic sense. That is marketing’s job, to name things after the fact and pretend they were destiny. I care that people are still sitting down in front of a terminal, or an editor, or a notebook, and quietly building small sharp tools that make someone’s day a little easier. If one of those tools happens to catch a strange, compounding kind of luck, great. If not, it still did something honest.
Maybe the healthier move is to retire the phrase “next big thing” entirely. The next big thing probably starts as a tiny thing that almost no one is watching, maintained by someone who is not trying to be a prophet, just a good crafts person. That is the part I want to stay close to. The rest is noise.
Thank you to Professor Bui at the University of Notre Dame for giving me an excuse to write, publish, and actually enjoy reading code-adjacent texts this semester, and for nudging me into a new programming language along the way.
I genuinely recommend this class to any student who wants to experience the real spirit of coding:
Curious, playful, and human.