>What an incomprehensibly huge achievement on both counts!
He is an amazing dev, don't get me wrong. BUT he had lots of luck starting from not choosing the name Freax, choosing the same license as his compiler (GPL), and a professor that did no understood free-software (Tannenbaum and his minix), the legal battle of the BSD's...and maybe a too expensive and ~slow solaris, and a really good but proprietary VCS (Bitkeeper) as a idea-blueprint for git.
True, although when you compare for example to people behind large brands with frequently huge acclaim, and then glimpse inside their (frequently) empty shell that is a marketing PR machine where all the real innovation, manufacturer and logistics is all bought, I think it's ok to give acclaim to somebody lucky, with prior art and inspiration from people who's shoulders they stand on, simply for the outcome that emerged.
What we call "luck" is very unevenly distributed in the world.
Linus is also lucky that he had decent nutrition in his childhood, and that Finland was not at war with Russia during his university years. He had the luck to be born to parents that were able to prioritize education over subsistence. So yes, he was lucky.
But in your previous comment, you also call Linus's choices "luck". That doesn't read fairly to me.
He had the luck to make good choices? Maybe in retrospect, but you must acknowledge that there's much more than luck involved.
Of the tens of thousands of people with enough "luck" to arrive at roughly the same place in 1991 -- by which I mean smart, well-fed, decent academic/life schedule with adequate free time, few or manageable commitments like spouses/dependent children or parents, broad and deep exposure to Unix, access to USENET and the Internet -- Linus remains exceptional.
My closing parenthetical was not a counterpoint to your message. It was to frame my perspective: I don't worship, but I do respect.
Perhaps I'm not communicating well today. I apologize if so.
Among the tens of thousands who were in the right place, single-digit dozens made the attempt, and only Linus succeeded in such a visible way. If you want to argue that he was merely the lucky one among dozens, then you still have a lot of extraordinary evidence to present, but you might have an interesting story to tell.
Your original comment reads like a dismissal because Linus drew inspiration from the world he lived in, and was just "lucky".
The point is that he did the work, he attracted the community, he managed the project. None of that was luck. And none of that is highly correlated with being an "amazing dev". Of course he stood on the shoulders of giants. Of course he learned from (and drew from) the environment around him. Of course Linux would be a forgotten academic project without the GNU userland (and license, maybe). Etc etc.
We all lived in that soup. Linus did the hard work and made something from it. I thought your comment was highly uncharitable in its disregard for all of things that made Linux successful.
He is an amazing dev, don't get me wrong. BUT he had lots of luck starting from not choosing the name Freax, choosing the same license as his compiler (GPL), and a professor that did no understood free-software (Tannenbaum and his minix), the legal battle of the BSD's...and maybe a too expensive and ~slow solaris, and a really good but proprietary VCS (Bitkeeper) as a idea-blueprint for git.