I just saw this thread and wanted to make a correction; Where did someone ever see Linus hating FreeBSD? Or BSD in general? Because I have seen Linus, actually SAYING, that not only did he love it, but that his REAL inspiration for Linux, was not Minix, but SunOS. (Watch Revolution OS, he says that his inspiration for doing Linux was that he LOVED the environment he had at school, and wanted that at home, and only could find Minix, and it wasn't suitable, and so he decided to do his own, and when the guy asking him asked what OS he used and loved, he answered SunOS, which is BSD).
SunOS and it's relations to BSD are fairly clear, but, just because I'm new here and don't know how many Unix History geeks are here other than me, I'll elaborate:
In the early days, Unix was used a lot at Berkeley, and EVERYTHING we now love about it, was probably something you can trace back to Berkeley, because some of the most amazing Hackers and Programmers in the World, seemed to start there. I've heard people say that a lot of big companies started in Garages... Well, a lot of GOOD ones started at Berkeley. (Like Steve Wozniak, the best Hacker on Earth who can design not only software but Hardware too! AND make it work!!) Anyway, Bill Joy, who did a lot of the work on Unix at Berkeley after Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had left, started this amazing idea there that other colleges and Berkeley working on Unix might someday mean something more.
They basically invented the idea of Open Source, other than the fact that the code they were messing with was AT&T (American Thieves and Thugs) Unix Code, and required a License, but, they shared it with other Source Licensed schools and so on, and what we now see in Free Software, could probably be traced back there.
Marshal Kirk McCusick was also there obviously, and they made what became BSD versions of Unix. They were awesome, and way better than the AT&T stuff which was basically outdated compared to their stuff. They also invented TCP/IP and BBnN wasn't happy about it because they had the contract to make that, but they did so much better that they won and got the contract to do TCP/IP. Anyway, after a while, they had an idea to start a company selling machines with BSD on them.
They wanted to sell basically Workstations, and put BSD on it instead of Unix from AT&T, and when Joy asked if Marshal wanted in on it, he said he was so close to finishing his thesis, he'd rather wait. Well, that single digit Employee number didn't come because they went ahead and started this little company selling BSD on commodity hardware, and named it Sun.
SunOS, was BSD. So, therefore, Linus can trace his idea of making a free OS, to, BSD!
Linus said he loved SunOS and THAT was what he wanted to mimic in his house to run something like it at home. So, take that into consideration and you have Linus saying basically BSD was so great that he had to have it at home, and so he made his own clone of BSD.
Today Linux is more popular than BSD, and has more people working on it, yet, BSD is still amazing and still has a loyal following. Linux is under the GPL, and a lot of companies don't like it because they have to release source code of everything they make from it.
To me, BSD is the best of both worlds... It has the grassroots Hackers behind it, but also big companies are probably going to get behind it more so too, because if they make an amazing product from a BSD based Licensed product, they aren't going to have to return it all back. They can actually CHOOSE what to do.
This isn't a shot at the GPL either. The GPL, DOES have it's merits, and it's points, and it's good to the World as well, and I can say I'm opinionated enough to pick sides, but, also, I can see the good in both too.
I also saw a quote here in someone's sig that said it was Linus Torvalds saying that if 386BSD had been around, he'd have never done Linux. And given that SunOS was BSD, and SunOS was what he liked, I tend to think that would have been true.
