> Adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market.[50]
If adoption first started in the less well-resourced academic organisations, I wonder if that commercial shift is connected with the pattern of more and more tech-types moving from academia into industry -- due to a growing lack of opportunity in the academic hierarchy -- bringing their Linux know-how into the large companies.
> Adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market.[50]
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Commercial_and_popular_u...