A project like what, exactly? Linux wasn't some high-minded academic project that would pick off a menu of contemporary systems research or software engineering

A project like what, exactly? Linux wasn't some high-minded academic project that would pick off a menu of contemporary systems research or software engineering goals. The early Linux project was a punk concept of its era. Linus very clearly started out as wanting to make a Unix-like kernel on commodity x86 PCs of the time. It was a personal, workstation hack for motivated tinkerers. Things like server and supercomputer usage were not imagined yet. I'm not even sure what a moral equivalent project idea might look like today. It was a typical hacker blend of wanting to emulate something that was scarce/expensive using less expensive resources. Today, the smartphone might be the equivalent commodity platform. Both iOS and Android might be equivalent to the MS/DOS+Windows hegemony. But there isn't any equivalent of the balkanized and expensive Unix vendor market for phones, which technical students might aspire to. Linux didn't set out to rewrite the popular commercial OSs of the day from Apple and Microsoft.