“I believe that starting somewhere in 1989-1991 Linus became
involved in the Minix community and that involvement proved to be
one of the keys to his success with the Linux kernel. The author of
Minix — Andy Tannenbaum — proved to be a very bad politician, as
often happens with professors of computer science ;-). He
misunderstood the value of GNU in the academic environment. His
decision to grant all MINIX commercial distribution right to
Prentice Hall (and PH charged $150 a license) was a political
suicide. Tannenbaum probably could have occupied Linus’ place in
the free software world (and can probably get more money by selling
books), just because Minix was developed earlier that Linux. But it
is the fact that Minix code remained proprietary that doomed it; he
failed to understand that if the OS is free, many more people will
use/support/enhance it, especially if it can run GNU software.”
“After cutting his teeth on Minix and having Usenet-based
connections with a rather large pool of talented people in Minix
community Linus decided to reengineer a full Unix kernel. I would
like to stress the importance of the community — it was
approximately 40 thousand community that included a lot of very
talented software developers (and many of them had known Unix
internals much better than Linus). Moreover many members of this
community wanted better system than Minix. Linus had chosen a
simple and realistic path — start from Minix kernel and gradually
modify it using available documentation about “real” Unix. The
idea was simple — to modify it in such way that it would allow
people to run GNU software today. That idea essentially
permitted hijacking the advanced part of Minux community —
the same members who press Andy Tannenbaum to add advanced features
and were frustrated by rejections. So this part of community was
ripe for hijacking :-).”
“It looks like the reasons for the success of Linux were more
subjective than objective. Linus Torvalds had an edge in speed of
development and user friendliness that helped him survive the
arrival of 386BSD one year after initial version of Linux kernel
was released. Although 386bsd was much more solid kernel from the
technical point of view, a two year pause between the release of v.
0.1 and v.1.0 killed the project. …due to the central role of the
kernel Linux very soon attained an independent status — without
competition from any other GNU-compatible kernel Linux
automatically became the most attractive platform for other open
source development projects. For example starting from version 0.12
Linux tremendously benefited from XFree86 effort. Orest Zborovski
(who BTW was also one of early Minix users and experimented with
Minix in 1990) decided to use Linux for his XFree86 development —
an extremely important project that tremendously helped Linux to
attain its current status.”