this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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Linux was called 'obsolete' in 1992, and now it powers servers around the world (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 1 week ago by fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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[–] mcv@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tanenbaum laid out why his hobby OS beat out Linus Torvalds' own pet project.

The primary reason why Linux beat out Minix, is that Tannenbaum wouldn't allow Minix to win. There was a desperate need for an open source Unix-derived OS at the time, and many people wanted Minix to become that, but Tannenbaum wanted to keep it clean and educational. FreeBSD could have been it had Linus not created Linux, but he did so at exactly the right time for it to be embraced by the community and launched into the stratosphere.

[–] moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's more to the credit of RMS, who was looking for a kernel to join GNU. And he picked Linux.

1989 was when the GPL was written, so this followed a few years later.

[–] capital5@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's no single individual that made it happen, but no doubt that Linus and RMS were the two biggest. Bear in mind that there were lots of additional contributors to the kernel and GNU as well.

I also think Red Hat was also one of the biggest contributors to Linux's success. So many of the most important technologies that we use today came out of RH. I don't have a lot of love for them today, but their contributions in the '90s and '00s was immense.

I actually think that a large part of the reason why PCs are much better open platforms than mobiles is because there is no Red Hat of the mobile ecosystem. Google started it out with AOSP, but then closed it up when they monopolized the market. Makes you wonder if RH would have done the same if they had the same kind of success.