From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3e1162e60603281141n5df3780dn15cef9816f0e47f6@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:41:04 -0800 From: "David Leimbach" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] [OT] hypothetical questions In-Reply-To: <0f95e8adbafc27a663f7331cb59b97bc@swtch.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: <283f5df10603281052n683bb0c6hac604bcb27c59261@mail.gmail.com> <0f95e8adbafc27a663f7331cb59b97bc@swtch.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 247a4ca4-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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 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 > >