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It would surprise me if Linus even knew about Solaris when he worked on the first release of Linux.

Solaris’ first release was in June 1992, with first use of the name in marketing materials in September 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#His...)

Linus’ famous message was from the same time (September 17, 1991)

Calling Linux an open source version of Minix is more appropriate, but it still wouldn’t be a good example of this.

Minix isn’t dead. It moved to a BSD license, and is deployed in millions of hundreds of millions of Intel CPUs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa...)

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I think that, once you're going that far back in history, it's pretty critical to keep track of the GNU/Linux distinction. Linus just wrote a kernel. And then the GNU userland, which had already been in development since the mid 80s, but was still somewhat lacking a workable kernel, was adopted as the official userland to use with the Linux kernel.

And at roughly the same time, IIRC, when Sun decided to migrate their Unix from a BSD flavor to a SysV flavor, which came to be called Solaris, they also used some GNU bits. Which might explain some similarities between the two.

The first Linux distribution I remember using was Slackware on floppy disks, at a time when building a kernel was pretty much necessary to get a working system. A great learning experience, all in all.

However, the point I'd like to make is that it was clear back then just how much was contributed directly by the GNU project, and also how favored GNU's GPL was by developers who wanted to contribute their work.

GNU really did seem like it was everything that made the Linux kernel act and feel like a Unix system, though I had no proper appreciation of that at the time.

Is this Richard Stallman? ;)

No, he wouldn't have called it GNU/Linux: https://www.sudosatirical.com/articles/richard-stallman-inte...

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