Perhaps I'm not communicating well today. I apologize if so. Among the tens of thousands who were in the right place, single-digit dozens made the attempt, and

Perhaps I'm not communicating well today. I apologize if so. Among the tens of thousands who were in the right place, single-digit dozens made the attempt, and only Linus succeeded in such a visible way. If you want to argue that he was merely the lucky one among dozens, then you still have a lot of extraordinary evidence to present, but you might have an interesting story to tell. Your original comment reads like a dismissal because Linus drew inspiration from the world he lived in, and was just "lucky". The point is that he did the work, he attracted the community, he managed the project. None of that was luck. And none of that is highly correlated with being an "amazing dev". Of course he stood on the shoulders of giants. Of course he learned from (and drew from) the environment around him. Of course Linux would be a forgotten academic project without the GNU userland (and license, maybe). Etc etc. We all lived in that soup. Linus did the hard work and made something from it. I thought your comment was highly uncharitable in its disregard for all of things that made Linux successful. > Yeah let's stop here it getting stupid. On this, we can agree.