Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.
33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.
(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)
(Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I “hallucinated” the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else’s comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )
I for one really appreciate the effort of supporting non-AT drives despite the initial skepticism.
I’m glad someone was able to donate a non-AT drive because Linus could not afford it :-(
Just look at those nested parentheses. A true sign of (pedantic) greatness, when a person needs to clarify something in their earlier clarification.
I love it™ (The nested parentheses are one of the greatest tools known to mankind (And to all other creatures))
To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.
…probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks,as that’s all I have. :-(.
Cuteness.
As in hilarity.
“Just a hobby, won’t be big” - he really didn’t think it will be one of the most sought after projects.
Or wanted to appear non-threatening
And an OS was born.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I was just thinking today about how I want a tattoo along the lines of “even the ones with digital watches”, great timing!
That post changed my life, gave me a great hobby, which became a career, and still puts food on the table for me and my family to this day. Thank you, Linus.
There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.
(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)
Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.
Jfc im older than Linux
Happy Birthday!
GNU is older than Linux? Neat.
Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)
I’m OOTL, what’s the backstory here?
Linux
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754
MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.
In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.
Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.
Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
It wasn’t FOSS, but then neither was Linux originally.
That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn’t strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.
Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.
Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn’t, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn’t strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole ‘FOSS’ mentality and rules for it wasn’t really a thing either back then.
There’s of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.
