In addition to sibling comments, remember that Linus announced Linux as: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a

In addition to sibling comments, remember that Linus announced Linux as: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. (...)" GNU couldn't use MINIX due to the license (unlike minix 3), and as I recall, the bsd's were also in somewhat unclear license terms. Gnu made the libc, compiler and various userland tools - but no-one did a" simple get it working"-kind of kernel, and then Linux came along. I suppose part of this might be because in early gnu days, most gnu hackers used university Unix machines - not personal 80x86 for development. If you bough sun hw you got Solaris. Only if you bought a pc clone would you be wanting a "real" os...