@Amanya, thank you very much. Its definately a read with an open mind. Sample Chapter 6 as I've pasted below, this is close to reverse engineering a concept. And this has been one of my points all along on freedom/open source. At least FSF as stallman said talks about ethics while Opensource does not. That is why on last saturday when I had time to code and when nothing was happening, I got wondering looking at the computer screen. What, seriously, what would drive or motivate someone who has no financial or social or any gains to be gotten from writing free-code as deep as the kernel. I think linus really wanted to produce something that would compete with the propreitary world and this was his overall motivation and I hope this book will change that opinion. There is not a single successful freedom/open source software that has been successful because it was different and not a feature copy of the proprietary. I mean, can you imagine that e.g. our Mobile Devs created a very successful app for KE and made it their idea proprietary under business, only to find someone else doing something very similar for pure financial gain and giving it for free and calling the proprietary devs corporate evils and anti-development. Will add more thots after the read over the weekend.
While the Windows NT kernel was state of the art at the time it was released in 1993, most of its good ideas have been learned well and absorbed, in spite of the fact that the code has never been released. For example, the Linux kernel supports asynchronous I/O (input/output), an innovative way to do reads and writes without tying up “thread” resources. This was an innovation first made widespread in Windows NT. The ability to load code dynamically is another important feature the Linux kernel adopted from NT and others. Plug and play and suspend and hibernate was a collaboration between Microsoft and hardware companies in the 1990s, and Linux now supports this feature. Throughout the free software stack, developers have incorporated good ideas from the outside world. There is no Not Invented Here syndrome in free software; a good idea is a good idea, and existing code is even better. In software today, the biggest impediment to sharing ideas is not ego, but license agreements.
@Aki when you have a few hours to spare please read After the Software Wars http://goo.gl/l9WHG