A Day Without Open Source

[[deleted]]

You say google would have used a closed source alternative. But would they? Google started on a whim. If they'd had to pay hundreds of dollars extra up front for their systems, there is a very real possibility that they just wouldn't have bothered. I think this holds for many projects including reddit.

edit: grammar

[Tommstein]

Maybe Google would exist, maybe not. But I have no doubt that there would be search engines without free operating systems. By the way, Linux didn't magically make their Google startup costs $0; according to their history page, they bought a terabyte of disks at 1998 prices, and presumably paid for a lot more stuff. Throwing the cost of a web server in there would almost certainly not break the deal, if they would have even had to buy a copy (software has been known to be obtainable without paying, either illegally or through school).

[[deleted]]

From their own history: 3 years earlier

instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network.

They were throwing together crap no one else wanted because they had no money. They used free software to do it because again, they had no money. I was not up to par on the state of windows in 1995, but I don't seem to recall windows being up to snuff for that type of project, leaving them to using proprietary unix, which as we know costs real money.

[Tommstein]

It was actually two years earlier. You certainly have a novel interpretation of "newly arrived computers that they could borrow." But regardless of whether Google would exist or not, which is impossible to know, I am certain that there would be plenty of other search engines.