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Linus would have written a kernel with or without GNU. There were other Free userlands available at that time, like that for Amoeba, as well as Free compilers.
by Sanddancer 11y ago
Linus would have written a kernel with or without GNU. There were other Free userlands available at that time, like that for Amoeba, as well as Free compilers. So saying there'd be no Linux without GNU is a dubious statement at best.
- ekianjo 11y agoDo you think that without the GNU toolchain Linux as a combination of GNU and the Linux kernel would have reached the point where it is now ? ANd there's also the valid point of the kernel being licensed as GPL2, which also helped for its adoption - and a direct influence of RMS on the young Torvalds.
- Sanddancer 11y agoTo be honest, one of the big reasons Linux is successful is it hit in a very narrow window during the USL v. BSD lawsuit where using a BSD distribution was questionable. So it's possble it wouldn't have, and other kernels, like BSD, or Minix, or any of the other kernels which had heavy development before the kernel research winter that we're still trudging through, would have seen the uptake instead. Linux being under an open source license was hardly an interesting thing back then -- Mach, the BSDs, etc were all under various Free licenses. So it could have, it could have not. Linux's success is as much luck as anything else.