[9fans] [OT] hypothetical questions

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

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