> Maybe, even if Linus noticed the Hurd, he would have started Linux
> anyway. It would have been legitimate, so please stop with this issue.
He knew. This is a quote from his emails with Tanenbaum, back in 1991:
If you write programs for Linux today you shouldn't have too many
surprises when you recompile them for Hurd in the 21st century. As
has been noted (not only by me), the linux kernel is a minuscule
part of a complete system: full sources for Linux currently runs to
about 200kB compressed - full sources to a somewhat complete
development system is at least 10MB compressed (and easily much,
much more). And all of that source is portable, except for this
tiny kernel that you can (probably: I did it) re-write totally from
scratch in less than a year without having any prior knowledge.
The full exchange is part of "Open Sources", published by O'Reilly, as
well as somewhere else on the net; I don't have it handy, I only quote
this fragment in my talks about the origin of Linux and that's what I
have handy.
/alessandro