Shared wonder is a much better idea - every civilization that researches Computers tech will have operating systems, but only one gets to develop Linux (let’s say it grants a science boost to everyone who finished researching Computers, but a huge culture/diplomacy boost to the civ that actually “built” Linux).
Similar to every civ gets a library, but there’s only one Library of Alexandria, etc.
That's the thing. Linux wasn't made by any one culture or country. Linux is a distributed product of the world no one can claim in good conscience. It's not Finnish, nor American, nor by Intel or by Google. It's not even Linus'. It's made by all of its contributors from all over the world.
In Civ parlance, whoever gets the Linux Kernel technology gets the same benefit as anybody else. No one is richer or better than the other civilization because of it, everybody is.
It’s a more basic conceptual mistake to say that Linux is a technology on the tech tree alongside Telecommunications / Computers / Wheel / etc. It would be like having “Automobilism” but then later “Lincoln Town Car.”
I get what you are saying about Linux being available to all (hence a shared wonder - the boost to the civilization who developed Linux can be interpreted as increased academic prestige, etc). The point is that Linux is a specific product of technology, not a broad area of human tech.
At the time Linus got started in 1991, *BSD was tied up in a legal dispute (which was not resolved until 1994), and Minix was only available under a restrictive license (Minix was relicensed BSD in 2000)
If either of those legal issues had not existed in 1991, Linus probably would never have started Linux [0], and Linux's place in history would have been assumed by something else – most likely some BSD derivative or a descendant of Minix.
(Minix's microkernel architecture, while elegant, has a performance cost. However, Minix could have easily been hacked into a monolithic kernel, which is basically what Apple did to Mach, and Microsoft did with win32k.sys. Or maybe it could have evolved towards a higher performance microkernel architecture, such as is found in L4)
In terms of the "technology tree", Linux occupies the place of "leading openly developed FLOSS operating system". If Linux hadn't occupied that place, some other system would have instead. And there is a chance even that one day Linux might be dethroned. (Unlikely to happen any time soon, but maybe some decades or centuries from now.)
Don't forget GNU Hurd, which had its first release in 1990. Had Linux not taken off it is possible Hurd would have taken a more practical approach and become a production OS.
Similar to every civ gets a library, but there’s only one Library of Alexandria, etc.