On 2010-10-18, at 10:30, Peter Corlett wrote:
Er... oh, fuck it, why didn't Linus come up with a VMS clone instead?
Because nobody would have given a shit. A company did come up with a cheap VMS clone for PCs back in the '80s, and didn't get any sales until they ported a UNIX compatibility layer on top of it and relabelled it "Lanetix". It wasn't a very good UNIX, so it still cratered, but at least it sold some. There's also been DCL shells for UNIX. I can't think of any that became popular.
