Linux turns 30: The biggest events in its history so far | ZDNet

1992: Andrew Tannenbaum, an operating system guru and creator of Minix, an educational operating system version of Unix, declares “LINUX is obsolete“, and Linux’s first operating system war is on. In the resulting discussion, Torvalds makes a very telling comment about his vision for Linux, which remains true today, “If the GNU kernel [another attempt to create a free Unix-like operating system] had been ready last spring, I’d not have bothered even to start my project: the fact is that it wasn’t and still isn’t. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now.”