[TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 9:42 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo at alchemistowl.org>
wrote:

> [I originally asked the following on Twitter which was probably not the
> smartest idea]
>
> I was recently wondering about the origins of Linux, i.e. Linux Torvalds
> doing his MSc and deciding to write Linux (the kernel) for the i386 because
> Minix did not support the i386 properly. While this is perfectly
> understandable I was trying to understand why, as he was in academia, he
> did not decide to write a “free X” for a different X. The example I picked
> was Plan 9, simply because I always liked it but X could be any number of
> other operating systems which he would have been exposed to in academia.
> This all started in my mind because I was thinking about my friends who
> were CompSci university students with me at the time and they were into all
> sorts of esoteric stuff like Miranda-based operating systems, building a
> complete interface builder for X11 on SunOS including sparkly mouse
> pointers, etc. (I guess you could define it as “the usual frivolous MSc
> projects”) and comparing their choices with Linus’.
>
> The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was
> embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a
> restrictive license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and
> that’s why Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers
> addressed my underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to
> other operating systems which made Unix the choice?
>

The AT&T lawsuit (April 1992) post-dated Linus starting on his work (eg
0.12 released January 1992). He said in an interview once he was unaware
that net/2 was out and could be leveraged to get a working system when he
started. It did give a big boost to Linux at a critical time due to the
huge amount of FUD that it created over BSD's future.

Warner
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