Linus has been accused of stealing Linux from MINIX. Is that true?
No. Absolutely not. Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution wrote a report, funded in part by Microsoft, claiming that Linus stole Linux from MINIX. Brown’s conclusion was that companies should not use Linux because the ownership of the intellectual property rights is unclear. This is complete garbage. While it is most unlikely that a 21-year-old student would have been inspired to write his own operating system had he not had the complete source code for a similar operating system available to study and modify, Linus wrote the initial version of the Linux system from scratch himself. The Brown report and a response from the creator of MINIX was discussed in detail on Slashdot.
