On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:44:49PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:09:08PM +0100, Eneko Lacunza wrote:
Hi Jeroen,
El s?b, 16-03-2002 a las 13:56, Jeroen Dekkers escribi?: Anyway, I think there would have been another Linux 8), but it is of course arguable.
I don't think so. Linus wanted to write an operating system. Almost everything was already there written by GNU. He only had to write a kernel and a few other things. He misnamed this to "Linux" and didn't credit GNU.
Now if he only had looked further, he had found that there were already people making an OS. He could have helped developping the GNU system. The problem is that there wasn't really much info about the Hurd nor was its development open. For this fact you can blame the FSF, but at that time all development was closed. The internet was just very small.
We will never known if there would have been somebody else developping a kernel for the GNU system if Linus didn't do it. I think a lot of the people were waiting for GNU to develop the last piece of the GNU system. Today still a lot of people are waiting or it, I hope it doesn't take that long anymore. :)
This was the history lesson for today.
This "lesson" is not true. 386/BSD was started almost at the same time as Linux. Even if Linux wasn't created, we still could use BSD (with GNU userland, if you want).