You may be interested to peruse some of the dialog of the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate http://en.

You may be interested to peruse some of the dialog of the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...). Basically, Andrew Tanenbaum, creator and advocate of the MINIX operating system (from which Linus drew some inspiration) got into a debate with Linus in 1987, claiming that the monolithic kernel design was inferior to the microkernel, and that Linux was obsolete from launch. Linus's responses throughout the debate strike me as some of his more respectful and thoughtful rhetoric. (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html)