On 10/15/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, we had the University of California, Berkeley release the essentially AT&T-Free 4.3 Net 2 BSD, followed by several spinoff projects from the Net2 release in the same timeframe as Linux (386BSD, which spun out FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSDI). Had Linus been hit by a bus (perish the thought) in 1991 we'd have had a very similar open source movement, just with a different free flavor of Unix.
And if USL hadn't sued BSDI and UCB, and thus cast a shadow across free BSD, it's quite possible that Linux would have remained an interesting reimplementation of Minix for the 386, used by a few hobbyists.
-Matt