Thought Experiment: What If Linux Never WAS ! 3775
Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. "The Alliance, a coalition of organizations from across the world whose goal is to enable governments to have direct...
Exactly. Once the 386 made Unix possible on Intel, it would have happened one way or another. Linux almost didn't get going; it was the lawsuit about the BSDs that kept them in legal limbo for a couple of critical years (1992-1994) and diverted developer attention to Linux.
The BSD developers were snobs at the time, which also helped Linux. The Linux developers were interested in getting Linux working with hardware people had, whereas the BSD developers felt that if you...
If Linux hadn't gotten started for whatever reason, someone else in the Minix camp would probably have started something similar - there was an active community developing patches for Minix to give it more advanced functions, but the license prevented them from being distributed as more than patches. It's hard to think that *nobody else* in that group would have just started over before the end of 1992 or so.
It's clear that the developer community was something of a supersaturated solution at that point, looking for a seed to crystallize onto. If Linux hadn't come along, some other project would have done it. At *worst*, there would have been so much built-up pressure by the time the BSDs were unencumbered that they would have taken off *fast*.
-- Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." - J.R.R. Tolkien, on critics