@Reiddragon >very clear he just wanted a UNIX system, he couldn't afford one, so he made his own UNIX clone for IBM-compatibles and that became unexpectedly popular
That is not what happened.

He was using MINIX with GNU software, but got sick of MINIX and then decided to replace MINIX, starting with the kernel; "This is a free minix-like kernel for i386(+) based AT-machines." (it was in fact proprietary software; `You may not distibute this for a fee, not even "handling" costs.`); https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01

For the start, what he wrote was a kernel for GNU, although of course he downplayed GNU by referring to it as "tools" - even though only a few GNU packages are tools; `Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools aren't in the distribution - ask me (or GNU) for more info.`


The kernel, Linux was not popular at the start - it only became popular when Linus relicensed to GPLv2-ambigious and convinced GNU developers to port glibc and all other GNU packages to work with Linux as well.