Different era then. Your options were basically just: - GNU: which didn't have a kernel - BSD: which had massive question marks over ownership - Minix: whic

Different era then. Your options were basically just: - GNU: which didn't have a kernel - BSD: which had massive question marks over ownership - Minix: which wasn't free back then - or a commercial Unix These days you have a dozen BSDs, Darwin, several OpenSolaris forks, hundreds of Linux distros as well as non-commercial licenses for many commercial Unixes. Minix is free. Free reimplementations of BeOS too. And that's before you count the plethora of free non-POSIX systems like Plan 9, ReactOS, and so on and so forth. And, ironically, there's now less of a need for competition in this space because web engines have replaced OS kernels for a lot of common use cases and WASM is fast becoming the new ABI. To be clear, I'm not saying this project has no merit. Nor am I saying there is zero chance this project might evolve into something big. I'm just saying that quoting Linus like you have is extremely simplistic.