AT&T's lawsuit that delayed the release of 4.4BSD certainly gave
Linux an opportunity to compete more seriously against free BSD
UNIX derivatives. If a BSD for Intel systems had existed sooner
then even Linus admitted that Linux would probably not exist now.
To call Linux a backlash against anything assumes that people
chose it out of spite, when in most cases people have chosen it
out of preference, certainly more so in the early days. I didn't
start running Linux because I wanted to stick it to Microsoft or
AT&T; I ran Linux because it was easily available and because I
really wanted a UNIX-like environment on a home computer.
And if you want to see where Ken Thompson's sense of esthetics
began, I highly recommend buying the now publicly-available
"Lions book", more formally titled _Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th
Edition with Source Code_, Peer-to-Peer Communications, ISBN
1-57398-013-7.
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