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I think BSD taking the lead once the legal issues were resolved would have been far more likely than Hurd taking the place of Linux.

Torvalds himself seems to have claimed that had Hurd been usable back then, he would never have taken Linux as far as he did. Minix seems to have been barely on his radar, if at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX#Relationship_with_Linux

The design principles Tanenbaum applied to MINIX greatly influenced the design decisions Linus Torvalds applied in the creation of the Linux kernel.[citation needed] Torvalds used and appreciated MINIX,[17] [...] Early Linux kernel development was done on a MINIX host system, which led to Linux inheriting various features from MINIX, such as the MINIX file system.

>[citation needed]

Hilarious...

Not true at all, MINIX was so much on the radar that the early Linux installations I used all used the MINIX filesystem. As far as I remember, Linus was a MINIX user and that was one of the things that inspired him to attempt what he did.

>And if Linux had not existed we would have had GNU Hurd way earlier in all likelihood.

Is that provable? :)

RMS said it himself.