No accident
No accident
Posted Aug 21, 2009 19:04 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355)In reply to: no gnu by bronson
Parent article: 40 years of Unix (BBC)
I think the point was (as I've heard RMS say many times) is that when Linus looked around for a compiler and user-space to complete his OS it wasn't by accident he found GNU. The FSF's route map towards system freedom started by re-implementing free versions of libraries on proprietary systems as they realised starting from the kernel would be a fairly tricky task.
Who knows what would have happened if Linus hadn't written his terminal emulator/kernel. Most probably something like BSD/Debian, but we'll never really know.