The existence of Minix certainly did play a role in Linus' decision to start Linux, at least according to Tanenbaum in the 3rd ed. of his OS textbook (no online ref; I flipped through a copy yesterday), and according to Linus' post reproduced at http://www.linux10.org/history/. I'm sure there are plenty of other references too, and Google can find them as well as 9fans can.
That's not the same as Tanenbaum playing an active role in the creation of Linux itself, which he didn't. I think that was Sape's point, though I don't think it's what the original post was trying to imply, especially given the earlier comments about organizations inadvertently helping to create other things. (If Sun hadn't unbundled their compilers, maybe gcc wouldn't have taken off. Etc.) If the Minix license had been different, maybe Linus wouldn't have created a new system. Too late now. Sape raises an interesting and unanswerable question: if there had been no Minix, would Linus have still been led to create his own OS? You'll have to build a time machine to find out. (This post is a futile attempt to snip this off-topic branch at its root. If nothing else at least it's tagged.) Russ
