Linus Torvalds about SCO, IP, MS and Transmeta

strmcrw writes " San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Linus. He talks about about SCO vs IBM and gives his opinion on Microsoft. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the Open Source Development Lab."

Comments

Minix: the origin of Linux?

[mikiN]

In the interview, Linus says that the origin of Linux was all written by himself. Yet, Linux history indicates to me that it was heavily influenced by Minix. In the early development stages of Linux, Minix was, I believe, not yet freely redistributable. So my question is: how much of the original Linux code actually 'borrowed' from non-free Minix and to what extent?

If any patents could be issued on any part of Minix (not possible anymore, I believe, because it has already been published), then this would mean bad times for Linux under the proposed new EU patent legislation.