@xianc78 @PurpCat @beardalaxy @sun Yes, it is correct that Linus originally intended to write his own OS - but realistically he *had no chance* of writing anything but a toy OS.

He didn't even have a chance of writing a functional kernel without GNU.

In 1992 he determined that if his project was going to get anywhere, he needed to integrate it with GNU and he deemed the only way he could get the GNU developers to trust him not to make things proprietary and so do most of the work for him, was to adopt a free GNU license and so he did so, deeming that he'll use it as "tit-for-tat license", rather than a license that defends the users freedom.

Of course he burnt that trust in 1996, by allowing the first of many proprietary software programs into his kernel, but by that stage the GNU/Linux system was pretty much ready for general usage, thus support for Linux was not dropped and when the proprietary finally compounded to a ridiculous level in 2008, Jeff released a free version of Linux; https://web.archive.org/web/20140203134408/http://lists.autistici.org/message/20080221.002845.467ba592.en.html resulting in GNU/Linux-libre (later maintained by lxo and jxself to make GNU/GNU Linux-libre.