is Linux a reverse engineering thing of Unix

Question

I'm new to Unix/Linux, sorry if my question is dumb, below is my understand of the relationship of Unix and Linux, please correct me if I was wrong:

Linus Torvalds wrote Linux kernel based on Unix (written by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie etc at Bell Labs), so Linus borrowed ideas from Unix, for example: fork()

So Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie should be the fathers of Linux, why everyone is talking about Linus Torvalds who seems to take all the credits?

Off-topic. Read wikipedia on Unix, POSIX, GNU and Linux. There is no reverse engineering involved. See also http://kernel.org/ — Basile Starynkevitch, Aug 24 '20 at 13:33
Related: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4091/is-linux-a-unix — Kusalananda, Aug 24 '20 at 13:36
Read also some textbook on operating systems, Advanced Linux Programming, and syscalls(2). See also operating system wikipage — Basile Starynkevitch, Aug 24 '20 at 14:24
RedHat's podcast Command Line Heroes may interest you as well. — Aaron D. Marasco, Aug 24 '20 at 14:35

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 24 '20 at 13:33

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The short answer: Linus doesn't take all the credit. He acknowledges that his is not the only effort in maintaining Linux. His is, however, the effort that wrote the first kernel of Linux, so the lion's share of the credit (IMHO) is rightly his.

The longer version of this answer could easily produce several doctoral theses, either in computer science or modern history fields.

answered Aug 24 '20 at 13:33

John

17,011

And Unix predated Linux by more than a decade. In 1985, I was running Unix on a Sun3/160 workstation. – Basile Starynkevitch Aug 24 '20 at 13:36
@John so Unix also has a kernel, which is part of Unix,isn't it? – amjad Aug 24 '20 at 13:38
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@amjad: your terminology is confusing, and you seems to be confused. Spend several days in reading more.... SunOS did had a kernel, different of utility programs. See also http://osdev.org/ – Basile Starynkevitch Aug 24 '20 at 14:25
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@Basile more than two decades even ;-). – Stephen Kitt Aug 24 '20 at 15:10

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 26 '20 at 15:47

From what I recall (there's been plenty of videos of Linus Torvalds discussing the origins of Linux), Linus, while at University or college, was doing a lot of work using Minix ("Mini-Unix," another Unix-derived system, where Unix had been around since the 1970's). As a kind of pet project during this time, He began developing His own kernel in order to address some of the things He thought were flaws in Minix (e.g. the fact that Minix had a micro-kernel architecture - i.e. the core of the system was very small in size, and a lot of the functionality existed outside of the kernel in other bits of code).

Linus perceived a monolithic kernel architecture (i.e. all of the core functionality, tasking, network activity, memory management, etc. to be within a single, larger kernel) to be faster, more stable and more secure (check out the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate"), so developed Linux around this in the early 1990's. For all intents and purposes, technically, Linux refers explicitly to the kernel, though it is often used to refer to a Linux distribution, or whole operating system.

A lot of the functionality was based on Unix functionality, such as pipelines, etc. and He kept the open source ethos, too, which allowed Linux development to grow into a community effort. Linux can be described as being Unix-like, because of the usage of some of the ideas develop in that, in the same way that Apple's MacOS can be described as being Unix-like, and even early MS-DOS, as the precursor to Windows, can be described as Unix-like.

score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 24 '20 at 15:22

Linus borrowed ideas from Unix

Technically, Linus wanted to build something like Minix, the Unix Like OS written by Andrew S Tanenbaum. Source Code of Minix wasn't available. Linux was inspired to go One Upon Minix & he succeeded.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie should be the fathers of Linux

Thompson & Ritchie wrote Unix yes, but Unix was Closed Source System. Genius of Linus was in

Writing fully functional System that could boot up & allow User to do productive Work
Enlisting Support of WorldWide Enthusiasts to make Linux better with every passing Day
Being the guiding light for Linux in it's 3'rd decade

Few examples like this.

Steve Jobs for Point & Click Moused-based Graphical User Interface, instead of folks at Xerox Parc Microsoft for PC Dos, instead of Gary Kildall...

Eg: Just because I use fork() command in my program, Ken Thompson won't be the author of my program.

irrepayable gratitude to them, YES.

Source code in Minix was and is always available, either by mail order or via a book,from early 90s, which I have in my shelves. I remember I had the source+binaries back in XT days, but can remember from where. Also Unix was not closed source. — Rui F Ribeiro, Aug 24 '20 at 16:01

is Linux a reverse engineering thing of Unix

3 Answers3