The Hurd

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:44:49PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:09:08PM +0100, Eneko Lacunza wrote:
> > Hi Jeroen,
> > 
> > El s?b, 16-03-2002 a las 13:56, Jeroen Dekkers escribi?:
> > 	Anyway, I think there would have been another Linux 8), but it is of
> > course arguable.
> 
> I don't think so. Linus wanted to write an operating system. Almost
> everything was already there written by GNU. He only had to write a
> kernel and a few other things. He misnamed this to "Linux" and didn't
> credit GNU.
> 
> Now if he only had looked further, he had found that there were
> already people making an OS. He could have helped developping the GNU
> system. The problem is that there wasn't really much info about the
> Hurd nor was its development open. For this fact you can blame the
> FSF, but at that time all development was closed. The internet was
> just very small.
> 
> We will never known if there would have been somebody else developping
> a kernel for the GNU system if Linus didn't do it. I think a lot of
> the people were waiting for GNU to develop the last piece of the GNU
> system. Today still a lot of people are waiting or it, I hope it
> doesn't take that long anymore. :)
> 
> This was the history lesson for today.

This "lesson" is not true.
386/BSD was started almost at the same time as Linux.
Even if Linux wasn't created, we still could use BSD (with GNU
userland, if you want).