By the late 80's things like the Fred Fish disks included source for a lot of the programs, many ported from Unix systems with according licenses attached.
Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.
I'm skeptical of attributing the crossover so strongly to Linus - e.g. while Aminet postdates Linux, I was used to source and sharing of source via Aminet well before I'd even heard of Linux, but before that also Fish disks and other of disks.
What is definitively true is that there was a big uptick as more people got modems and were getting exposed more to free software thinking.
> Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.
I knew Vim came from the Amiga community as a vi clone. But I didn't know Microemacs was originally a microcomputer Emacs clone. Thanks for your comment.
I keep wanting to systematically go through the old source archives available looking for gems.. There's so much to learn, be it history or interesting ideas. I remembered Microemacs largely because I once started collecting code from Fish disks that came with source, and it was notable for the sheer number of versions.
By the late 80's things like the Fred Fish disks included source for a lot of the programs, many ported from Unix systems with according licenses attached.
Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.
I'm skeptical of attributing the crossover so strongly to Linus - e.g. while Aminet postdates Linux, I was used to source and sharing of source via Aminet well before I'd even heard of Linux, but before that also Fish disks and other of disks.
What is definitively true is that there was a big uptick as more people got modems and were getting exposed more to free software thinking.