Many argue, including Linus himself, that had 386BSD had floating point emulation (which Linus eventually contributed to 386BSD by the way) and the licensing issues and legal battles between Unix <-> BSD hadn't happend, he might have not made Linux.
I think he said all of that in his book "Just for Fun". Dave On 3/28/06, Russ Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > >
