> I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches? In addition

> I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches? In addition to what's been said about BSD and Hurd, Minix could also have spawned a directly related Free Software variant (Torvalds had access to Minix and used it but Linux isn't really based on it), and someone else entirely could have done essentially the same thing as Torvalds. Torvalds and, therefore, Linux was in the right place at the right time in multiple respects, but others were pretty damned close, and could have been there had Linux not existed. > What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source version? Would we be using "Livax" today? In fact, there is a FreeVMS project: http://www.freevms.net/ http://www.freevms.net/ It's perfectly legal to copy APIs and the "look and feel" of an OS.