"Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX."
Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix).
It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost).
I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.
Linux was also Free. It's hard to beat Free of acceptable quality - the kids would install it to check it out, see that it's cool, then leave high school ready to be Linux sysadmin interns. In contrast, they might get a few minutes per week of mainframe time in University.
Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix).
It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost).
I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.