The Hurd

Alessandro Rubini rubini at gnu.org
Mon Mar 18 19:37:42 UTC 2002


> 	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



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