Google’s initial public offering just got more interesting with 31 underwriters for the offering now named. Google’s been defying every tradition we know of for public stock offerings, and this just seems to take it one step further. Whether this will all work the way it’s intended or not, I suppose we have no choice but to wait and see.
In other news, a new study contests that Linus Torvalds is the father of Linux; since it took three years to write Minix, the study contends, it’s nearly impossible that Linux could be written in nearly half the time.
I quote from Linux Torvalds’ book Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary:
One of the original problems I had with Minix was that if you had five different programs running at the same time and they all want to read different files, the tasks would be serialized. In other words, you would have five different processes sending requests to the file system . . . Under Linux, which is a monolithic kernel, you have five different processes that each do a system call to the kernel. The kernel has to be very careful that they don’t get confused with each other, but it very naturally scales up to any number of processes doing whatever they want. It makes Linux much faster and more efficient. (99-100)
The fact is that linux is more portable than minix. What? I hear you say. It’s true-but not in the sense that ast means: I made linux as conformant to standards as I knew how . . . (105)
In brief, Linux is a completely different system philosophy and can’t be based under Minix without severe alterations to Minix code. Linus also discusses how Linux started out as a terminal emulator because he absolutely hated what was offered under Minix (which wasn’t really much of anything at all). Linux evolved from there.
In addition to this, the article also states that Andrew Tanenbaum, author of Minix, even contests this study.
Hopefully, this gives some insight from Linus’ side of it.
Additional References:
Andrew Tanenbaum’s Response
Followup to Andrew Tanenbaum’s Response
Linus’ flippant response
ZDNet: Is Torvalds really the father of Linux?
Linux News: Open Source: Accusatory Study: Many Open-Sourcers Steal Code