Linus to speak on "The Origins of Linux"

Paul J. White writes: "Everyone in Silicon Valley will probably be there when Linus Torvalds lectures on "The Origins of Linux" in Mountain View, California on Wednesday, September 19, 2001 at 6 PM. It's bound to be interesting, so sign up early!"

Comments

Seen it before

[The Ultimate Badass]

I actually saw Richard Stallman give a talk on linux 3 years ago when I was at Georgia tech. He discussed how the software project had grown from inauspicious roots as a terminal emulater that Linus had written in C to becoming an OS, based in Andrew Tannenbaum's xenix microkernel.

Of course, the time was ripe for a project like this, since Andrew wasn't willing to accept any patches to his system, effectively preventing the inclusion of virtual memory, multitasking and a useful filesystem. Stallman made the point that any usable ase for an OS would have been successsful at that point, as long as the developer was willing to accept people's additions. Linus just happened to be in the right place at the right time

It's funny to think that, had RMS had more foresight, we'd all be using HURD today, and Linus would be an unknown doctoral student/graduate at Helsinki university!

Re:Seen it before

[gallir]

based in Andrew Tannenbaum's xenix microkernel.

What? It's Minix, Minix, Minix. Xenix was always proprietary, and is going to die as such.

OTH, Minix was ergh... shared source? It died anyway...

Re:Seen it before

[DrXym]

The thing is HURD was announced before Linux so RMS really has little excuse for the current state of the world.

I suspect that part of the reason he's so bitter about Linux ("call it GNU/Linux!") is because Linux took off like a rocket while HURD wallows in obscurity, never likely to be more than an evolutionary dead end.

That's not to say HURD is bad, it's just that Linux is and was more popular - partly because Linus is such a strong leader, partly because the kernel is so easy to get into and partly because it actually works dammit.

Religion

[SilentChris]

"Everyone in Silicon Valley will probably be there when Linus Torvalds lectures on "The Origins of Linux" in Mountain View, California on Wednesday, September 19, 2001 at 6 PM. It's bound to be interesting, so sign up early!"

"from the on-the-seventh-day-he-rested dept."

*Sigh* Well, it is a religion.

I miss the days when operating systems ran programs, and weren't political statements.

Re:must be a US citizen? Can you read?

[paul7e]

Please don't be an alarmist unless you've actually looked at the site, the event is open to all.

However, the Museum is currently housed on an old military facility (that's still owned by the military), so you need picture ID.

Non-citizens, like it says multiple times on the site, just need to bring their passport or Green Card. But everybody needs to make advance reservations so they can run you through whatever security database they use.

paul

It's all clear...

[Spackler]

When you RSVP, please provide: For US citizens: Full name, affiliation, address, phone number, and notification of US citizenship. (Please bring your picture ID.)

Bush: How can we get rid of all these commie bastards that the MPAA keeps bugging me about?
Ashcroft: If we grab their hero, and make them want to come here for him, we can get them all in one place.
Cheney pulls off Bush mask
Cheney: They would never fall for that, it's a military base!
Ashcroft: I got two words for ya, slash dot!
Linus: Um, Mr. Asscroft, that's one word.
Ashcroft: Guards, sieze him!
Cheney: IANAL, but BWahahahahahhaha!

They might as well...

[Kasreyn]

...the way our laws are going all the professional OSS coders are gonna be fleeing the country anyway (probably to Russia just to make the irony that much more perfect), so why not arrest them before they can escape? After all, every one of them used their brains today, and brains can be used to write code, and code can be used to circumvent encryption schemes, so the brain is a circumvention device. It's basically a crime to be a computer programmer in the US now, so git while the gittin's good is my advice...

-Kasreyn