fakedsysadmin - 11:12 pm on Oct 15, 2008 (gmt 0)

You might want to hear Richard M Stallman explanation for the delay in the development of the GNU kernel:

ftp://ftp.gnumonks.org/pub/congress-talks/Richard%20Stallman/

The explanation is basically in the middle of the talk, minute 30 plus approx.

Stallman's quote: "We were working on a kernel, which was actually delayed by the fact that we have decided to base it on the Mach microkernel, but for a while there was export control..."

That talk was given on September 27, 1997 in Aachen, Germany.

I should point out that the Soviet Union came to an end on December 21, 1991.

So it's easy to figure out why 32-bit based hardware and apps were freely deployed across the world after the end of the USSR.

Unfortunately, that's how the world works.