On Thu, 20 Jan 2022 13:25:50 -0500
Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 06:40:13PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> > On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
> > >
> > > Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought
> > > that Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the
> > > UNIX group - I wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and
> > > "The Unix Programming Environment" would have happened without
> > > his obvious ability to take abstruse and difficult material and
> > > make it accessible.
> > >
> > > If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he
> > > didn't mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus'
> > > original email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that
> > > linux wouldn't have happened.
> >
> > I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".
> >
> > Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I
> > believe) because he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of
> > his own, and therefore he was of course going to build it using as
> > much free (of charge) software as he could.
> >
> > That meant GNU.
> >
> > I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful,
> > and formed the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of
> > those principles are embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU
> > (for example, devices as files, and pipes, in the first; and tools
> > such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so these days we can't really
> > separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU (although the
> > reverse is not true).
>
> And don't forget Minix, the system he used while developing his
> kernel.

Didn't Linus start what became Linux because Minix was only 286 capable
and was not going to be upgraded and Linux wanted something that
would run on 386 cpus.

I think there was also a licensing issue involved in modifying Minix.
>