On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

>> Linus Torvalds, Tenenbaum (of Xinu fame) and the BSD people
>> were started
>> by the closure of access to unix sources afaik.
>
> But Linus sure did not start the OSS movement (though he gave it a
> important impulse), and Tanebaum was never part of it (Minix was not
> OSS).

Linus decided to implement an OS (and not a MUD game or something else) 
because he was in the field and probably subjected to a number of 
influences (like the frustration of the price of a unix license probably 
- and the unavailability of its source code for study). He was already 
using gcc, which came from the FSF. One thing led to another and then 
critical mass was reached. Tanenbaum had to teach a OS course and he 
could not do it with Unix source code, since it was not accessible by 
then afaik. Minix strongly influenced Linus afaik. He and Tanenbaum were 
al loggerheads over several issues at the time according to archived 
messages.

Peter
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