Re: [ossig] Re: [myoss] Linus did not create Linux

[Ditesh Kumar <ditesh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> incidentally, i just got a "Site Temporarily Disabled" message on
> accessing www.adti.net, when barely 20 minutes ago i got in.

Tanembaum's writeup on the issue is hilarious. An excerpt from
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/:

"Thus, of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in
the Linux source code. He had my book, was running MINIX, and
undoubtedly knew the history (since it is in my book). But the code was
his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up. MINIX is a nice,
modular microkernel system, with the memory manager and file system
running as user-space processes. This makes the system cleaner and more
reliable than a big monolithic kernel and easier to debug and maintain,
at a small price in performance, although even on a 4.77 MHz 8088 it
booted in maybe 5 seconds (vs. a minute for Windows on hardware 500
times faster). Instead of writing a new file system and a new memory
manager, which would have been easy, he rewrote the whole thing as a big
monolithic kernel, complete with inline assembly code :-( . The first
version of Linux was like a time machine. It went back to a system worse
than what he already had on his desk. Of course, he was just a kid and
didn't know better (although if he had paid better attention in class he
should have), but producing a system that was fundamentally different
from the base he started with seems pretty good proof that it was a
redesign."

After all these years, the man is still pushing minix ... :)

-- 
Ditesh Kumar
Ameba6 Solutions Sdn. Bhd.

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any
power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second
is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this,
but the margin is too narrow to contain it.
				- Fermat's Theorem, Pierre de Fermat


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