While the people you mention did say those things, I don't see how the contradicts Lennart's assertion. It is true that historically a Unix distribution did ind

While the people you mention did say those things, I don't see how the contradicts Lennart's assertion. It is true that historically a Unix distribution did indeed consist of the tools, C library and kernel and that they we all released together in sync and were provided in one source archive[0]. To my mind, these ideas are not necessarily in conflict, one is about what comprises the entire product and the other guides design and implementation. In my opinion, I don't think it's fair to characterize Microsoft's OS design principles as "integrated so tightly... that it becomes difficult to tease apart or to understand." It is true that Windows (NT) is pretty tightly integrated with it's own components, I would argue this is because the majority of it was written by Microsoft. Many of the commercial Unix products were also similarly integrated for much the same reason. I'd argue that the only reason we see the modularization in Linux is because, historically, the modules were written by entirely different groups of people. As this changes and one group begins to control more and more components, it seems both natural and reasonable that they would integrate those components more tightly. Many of the Linux distributions appear to agree that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, most Linux distributions are like the Unix distributions of old: they include the tools, C library, kernel and now a plethora of software. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#Components