The point of the postscript

In a previous rumination over Open Source, I quoted Linus's original Usenet post announcing the beginnings of Linux. I left it sitting there somewhat ambiguously, and since a certain amount of ambiguity can be useful, and since this is a blog, not a wiki, I'm going to leave it that way in the original and comment on it here instead.

The point I was making is this: The post strongly suggests Linus thought he was just throwing stuff at the net, but this is highly ironic in light of what actually played out. Little did he know ...

One might go further and speculate about why one would want to put something like that out and invite feedback. My personal guess is that Linus's post cautiously understates what he thought his as-yet-unnamed OS might become. This, in turn, vastly underestimates what it actually has become.