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Who Wrote Linux?
Dozix007 writes "There is an interesting article by Jan Stafford on the myths of Linux creation. This episode of the series of Linux creation myths, one fellow plays "I Spy," and the other reveals the true origins of the man from Redmond. The author is offering a $50 gift certificate and IT books to the best spinners of tall Linux creation tales. If you can outdo these tall tales."
It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. -- Roger Babson
Tell me how, when, where and why you created Linux. The best story I receive-- as judged by an impartial jury of editors -- will win a $50 gift certificate
/. sanctioned trollfest...
OK, this should be fun... a
obviously.
SCO wrote Linux. Zing!
Unfortunately there is not room in the margin of this webpage for the full source...
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Al Gore, no?
I mean, Linus is the creator of Linux, not the "writer of Linux", am I correct? I know I'm being picky (I "write" code) but I see this alot.
Sigs cause cancer.
Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) began the development of Linux, an operating system kernel, and today acts as the project coordinator (or Benevolent Dictator for Life). Inspired by the demo-system Minix developed by Andrew Tanenbaum, he felt the need for a capable UNIX operating system that he could run on his home PC. Torvalds did the original development of the Linux kernel primarily in his own time and on his equipment.
... I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less."
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, as the son of Nils and Anna Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s, his father a Communist who in the mid-1970s spent a year studying in Moscow. This caused embarrassment to Linus at the time since other children would tease him about his father's politics.
His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 6% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling. He attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a masters degree in computer science.
Linus Torvalds currently lives in San Jose, California with his wife Tove (six-time Finnish national Karate champion), whom he first met in fall 1993, his cat Randi (short for Mithrandir, the Elvish name for Gandalf, a wizard in The Lord of the Rings), and his three daughters Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20, 2000). In June 2004 Linus purchased a home in Beaverton, Oregon and enrolled his children in school.
He worked for Transmeta Corporation from February 1997 until June 2003, and is now seconded to OSDL to work on the Linux kernel full-time. Although OSDL is based in Portland, Oregon, he worked from his home in San Jose.
His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of Linux.
Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Linus and coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief.
Unlike many open source "evangelists", Torvalds keeps a low profile and generally refuses to comment on competing software products, such as Microsoft's commercially dominant Windows operating system. He is neutral enough to even have been criticized by the GNU project, specifically for having worked on proprietary software with Transmeta and for his use and alleged advocacy of Bitkeeper. Nevertheless, Torvalds has occasionally reacted with strong statements to what has been widely perceived as anti-Linux (and anti open source) FUD from proprietary software vendors like Microsoft or SCO.
For example, in one e-mail reaction to statements by Microsoft Senior-VP Craig Mundie, who criticized open source software for not being innovative and destructive to intellectual property, Torvalds wrote: "I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? He's not only famous for having set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants
Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his own OS; he gave a working name of Linux (Linus' Minix); but thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to have it named Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter x). His friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded
..created Linux after shipping Internet v1.0b
You insensitive clod!
I bet this thread gets the highest AC post ratio EVAR.
Which coincidentally also hosts the annual wife-carrying world championship.
It was Tux!
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
The post or the story to which it refers.
...I'm pretty confident about that.
Linux is free to share,
sharing is caring,
caring shows love,
love is blind,
Ray Charles is blind,
Ray Charles wrote linux....
-- Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
It was written by Bill Gates, but Shawn Fanning stole the floppy disk with the code on it! He subsequently dropped it and it was found by the FreeBSD maintainers, who promptly died. Andrew Tanenbaum picked up the disk and ran away, only to be sucker-punched to the throat by SCO, who were sucker-punched to the throat by IBM, who in a spirit of generosity gave it to the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, who made a copy each. The Tooth Fairy shoved her disk into Torvald's mouth and Santa Claus gave it to him for Christmas.
The End.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
didn't Al Gore develop the Linux Kernel when he was a congressman?
itadakimasu
It was Darl McBride, of course!
He created the kernel.
I second that notion! -Darl McBride
Darl McBride. Face it, none of the rest of us come even close to make up such tall tales of Linux development.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
SCO did !
I can tell you the whole story but its so secret that I have to kill you afterwards.
BTW This comment is so small that I cant write it all here....
Just saying it like it are.
You see he went back in time, named it after this Crazy guy named Linus, and now uses it to extort $699 from everyone! I am not crazy, just bored.
Tooth fairy and Santa Claus
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
If you can proofread this article which is only one paragraph long.
I don't know if I have ever seen the word obtusely used outside of my math classes. I knew they would come in handy someday...
Hmmm.
but i didnot killed the windows xp
Lets hope for this guy.
Could this work? Should CS ciriculum include "erotic bodyrub"? You tell me!
My homework
...of course...
Linux was written by a large group of Knights Templar and Rosicrucians around 1340 AD. It is also said to have been discovered by Jewish Cabalists within the Torah around the same time. Partial source is said to be found in the Koran, but recent disputes about whether the Koran was actually written in Aramaic cast many doubts on that.
That Torvalds discovered and attempted to run the sacred kernel is still considered to have been the most arrogant hubris by those who know.
Albert Einstein wrote it while trying to explain where all the missing left socks go, but dismissed it as rubbish. Little did he know that eighty years later it would be resurrected by a young Finnish student hoping to impress the ladies with a reimplementation of Minix.
After Donald Rumsfeld gave him a copy of the Minix source code in the 80s, or course.
I post on /., so for all intents and purposes I am a kernel hacker, right?
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Why did I type that?
The gun is good - Zardoz
[ raises hand ]
Best Buy can have you arrested
The truth is just as unlikely as these made up stories.
A world class operating system started from scratch by a single person, with no commercial incentive?
A group of hundreds (thousands?) of persons are from differing countries organization, commercial and voluntarily maintaining and improving it? Concerted development support from companies (IBM, Sun, Novell, HP, Fujitsu, et al) that are fierce competitors every other day of the week?
Its really amazing. Good luck to everyone trying to spin a better tale than this.
I wrote Linux in college, but my roomate (some Torvalds guy) stole it from me while I was taking a nap. I'm the REAL Linus!!
The original kernel was stolen from the back of a "Star Bix" breakfast cereal box. One day, when time-travel is implemented, Linus will go back in time and sue Star Bix (and Andy Tanenbaum) for patent infringement.
dinner: it's what's for beer
C'mon, everyone knows where Linuxes come from. Microsoft opened its Minix source code to inspire innovation, competition, and freedom. Some commie kid from an ex-soviet state copied it, changed its name, and threw it through a loophole in Microsoft's license, spamming the Internet with his technoporn. A global horde of terrorists have kept the antiamerican project running by stealing Windows code with worms, viruses and spyware. Fortunately, since the World Trade Center collapsed after its Linux firewall failed, Bill Gates has given stock options in Microsoft to anyone who patches these insidious attacks and delivers the scalp of one of these demonic hackers. That's how we got bin Laden: when Saddam Hussein turned over his buddy's secret IM ID. Now we're all safe here in the Utah-rded States of a Microsoft.
--
make install -not war
And the obvious answer is CowboyNeal!
With Professor Plum
In the Conservatory
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Linus holds the *trademark* for the word Linux. He holds the copyright on some of the code for Linux, but at this point I'm sure it's far from all of it, probably not actually even a large fraction of it. If I write a patch and submit it to Linus, I hold the copyright on that patch. Copyright on the patched code would be a very sticky issue, but since we all agree to distribute the code under the GPL license, as long as you stay within the terms of the license who owns the copyright is moot.
:)>
It's possible that Linus requires you to agree to assign copyright to him to submit code, but I doubt it.
Personally, I write code. You can call it developing or creating, and you're right, but the specifics of what I do is writing. It is no different than writing a book, except that it's instructions in a very pedantic language.
<Note: I personally have not contributed to the Linux kernel; I'm using the royal we above
I bet it would not be too hard to build a spam filter for Slashdot that automagickally modded posts like this "troll". Or just auto-troll all first posts!
And together, we will not falter.
... is if you replace 'written' with 'created', 'based on', or 'developed', you can concievably get different answers.
Sorry if I'm being nauseatingly obvious, but it occured to me after considering that I was blending the terms 'written' and 'created by' together.
"Derp de derp."
Linux washing powder!
I'm Sparticus!
Kathy Bates (Bobby Boucher's Mother): I wrote Linux. Lius Torvalds is the devil!
In A.D. 1989 War was beginning. Captain: What happen ? Mechanic: Somebody set up us the BSOD. Operator: We get no signal. Captain: What, CTRL+ALT+DEL ! Operator: Main screen turn on. Captain: It's You !! Gates: How are you gentlemen !! Gates: All your b0x3n are belong to us. Gates: You are on the way to destruction. Captain: What you say !! Gates: You have no chance to survive make your time. Gates: HA HA HA HA ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'kernel hacker' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'Tux'.
Captain: For great operating system.
In the beginning God created the dos and the windows. And the Windows was without stability, and void; and blueness was upon the face of the CRT. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the code.
And God said, Let there be linux; and there was linux. And God saw the linux, that it was good: and God divided the linux from the windows. And God called the linux 0wn4g3, and the windows he called suck4g3.
Jay | http://oldos.org
...was found by disassembling the OS of an early mobile phone embedded in a Coca Cola can as part of a marketing promotion.
This original kernal was called "Pepsux".
It was my dog -- you see, she's a Soviet spy in disguise, and one day when I wasn't skipping school she turned my computer on, and wrote Linux.
Alas, in those days the internet connection here wasn't all that great, so she never managed to send it back to her commanders in Russia...
And that's how it came to be.
[By the way, in Soviet Russia Linux writes you!
Sorry, couldn't help it.]
It's turtles all the way down.
In the beginning Linus created the source and the code. ...
And the source was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the screen. And the Spirit of Linus moved upon the face of the keyboard.
And Linus said, Let there be prompt:and there was prompt.
And Linus saw the Prompt, that it was good:and Linus divided the Prompt from the GUI.
Scotty left it behind when he visited San Fancisco in 1986, where he deployed it out of necessity after becoming frustrated by contemporary computer capabilies. It remained confined to a small materials lab for some time, out of respect for the Prime Directive, but soon "escaped" when pre-warp society was threatened by suspicious borg-like activity.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Fun and misinformation, all roled into one! 10 years from now, a highschool kid will be researching finland and find a juicy tidbit on how thier primary export is free software written by one solitary penguin monk who hasn't uttered a peep in 30 years. and never touches a text editor, he manually flips bits with his flippers.
I wrote linux... and I will do it again Linux.
Then the new slashdot fad would become: s3c0nd ps0t!!!1111
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
The truth is out. There is no more use pretending. Finland doesn't actually exist. The Europeans are pretending that there is a country there to hide the fact that there is a vast, cross-national research area there, where European scientists experiment with alien artifacts, antigravity, and the perfect Martini. A kind of European Area 51, just with reindeer, bartenders who know what they are doing, gorgeous Italian lab assistants, and the scientists are generally better dressed than their Area 51 counterparts.
Of course, if you are trying to hide the existence of a huge secret cross-national government research lab, you have to do some fancy footwork. After some people got dangerously close to the truth, desparate measures were needed. Since the Europeans don't like Microsoft or AT&T anyway, they decided to kill two birds with one stone: the secret government labs churned out a UNIX-work-alike operating system and pretended it came from someone from Finland. Nobody would have guessed that any organization would have had the resources or the guts to do something like that just to hide the non-existence of an entire country.
Originally, things were easy: the code got created, distributed over networks, and everybody thought there was an actual person from "Finland" behind it who created it. However, things backfired and they ended up needing a real person. Eventually, a Greek sailor by the name Linos Torvalos volunteered to undergo the necessary physical alterations (and live with hair dye products until the day he dies) in order to be passed off as someone from the non-existent nation of Finland.
The SCO lawsuit, however, really has them in a bind: on the one hand, it is quite clear that their original story that a "Finnish student created Linux in his spare time" can't possibly be true, given the sheer volume of code, but on the other hand, they can't reveal the true origin of the code, the army of programmers in an undeground bunker (which they refer to as "Santa's Little Helpers"), that created Linux.
We are all waiting with bated breath for the resolution of this real-life drama of espionage, deception, and government coverups.
. . . and my wife wrote his sonnets!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Oh, and they were under contract from SCO, so there.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I am Linuxacus!
No, I am Linuxacus.
Choose me...I am Linuxacus!
I'm Linuxacus and so's my wife...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Quote, from one Mark Adams:
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
and i have the source to prove it...
"Who cares?"
Linux was created by 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters
A race of super-intelligent interstellar penguins did it.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
A long time ago, in a galaxy not unlike this one, the microprocessor was invented. There was much rejoicing over this discovery; no longer must computers be controlled by a mystic priest-hood. Computers can be used by all as useful tools!
The knights of hackerdom, hereafter referred to as hackers, used and developed and promoted and in general considered this new breed of computer a Good Thing. These magical devices could lead to wonders never before seen in the galaxy. So these hackers, a strange group to begin with, devoted their lives to the development of this technology.
For a while peace and prosperity filled the galaxy. This was the age of Apple II's and Commodore 64's, Atari's and TRS-80's. A renewed sense of learning and cooperation-operation filled all the lands. There was comfort in knowing that for all the programs being used the source was flowing freely. When one had the source code, happiness and well-being flowed.
Unfortunately during this time there was a rumbling in the source. One of the first systems, the Altair system, had a BASIC interpreter crafted by a young hacker named Bill. Bill, however, did not want the source of his creation flowing freely. He enjoyed subverting the source for his own purposes, mainly for monetary benefit. The use of proprietary code is the dark side of the source.
This new age of joy and prosperity had to come to an end sooner or later. An old Imperial Power, IBM, decided to try to control this new way of life. It released its PC, thus beginning the clone wars. With IBM clones flooding the market, backed by the old Empire, up-starts had little chance. The ix86 architecture was enforced. This was a chaotic time, and IBM made one mistake. Needing an Operating System to be the life-source of their new product, IBM chose young Bill to obtain one.
About this time the dark side of the source became too much and young hacker Bill became Darth Gates. Obtaining an inferior 8-bit OS, he made this the mainstay of the IBM world. In just a few short years Darth Gates controlled the OS, managing to leave the old Imperial IBM far behind. While Gates could have used his powers for good, instead he chose to strive for evil.
While all this was happening, rebel groups attempted to bring down the evil stronghold. Apple, Amiga, and Unix factions fought valiantly, as did some direct competitors in Darth Gates' market. Alas, to no avail. And as the evil OS moved from version 1.0 through version 6.0 the future looked dim.
To make matters worse, Darth Gates hatched a sinister plan to counter-act the minimal success of the rebels; steal their technology. Thus the DeathOS was devised. The first half-working version was DeathOS3.1, and it could destroy the usefulness of even the most powerful 386. While the rebels learned to fight off this beast, the new DeathOS's, 95 and NT were developed that could even bring down mighty Pentium systems. The future looks grim, can no one stop this plague?
Unbeknowned to Darth Gates, on the planet Finlandia a young hacker named Linus has a vision. He decided that a 386 could be made to do something useful after all. And out of this vision came **Linux**!!! Drawing from the mystic Unix religion, this new OS was developed. Strong in the free side of the source, **Linux** only grew more and more powerful every day. Improved by hackers throughout the galaxy, and aided by strong flightless waterfowl the OS became a major fighting tool of the rebels. Hackers, which had been a dying breed, rallied behind **Linux** and the GNU project. ALL IS NOT LOST! THE GALAXY CHAFING UNDER DARTH GATES WILL RISE AGAIN!! THE BATTLE HAS BEGUN!!!!!! WHO WILL WIN??????
To find out, watch for the upcoming OS Wars Trilogy, appearing soon in a theater near you.
And, as always, MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU.
respects to author Vince Weaver
Technoli
And the program was with without form, and void; and darkness was upon the faces of the screen.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the source of the code.
And God said, Let there be Linux: and there was Linux.
And God saw the Linux, that is was good; and God divided the Linux from the Windows.
And God called the Linux Open Source, and the Windows he called Closed Source. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
/ Let's have a real creation myth.
No one created linux it made it self.
That sure explains the UI.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm the older brother of Linus. Our wicked parents have kept me locked in the basement since the day I was born, due to me being somewhat weird looking and stinky.
I've lived all my life locked in a cold, damp basement in my parents house in a little town in Finland. My only light is the dull glow of my greenscreen monitor. I've never washed or cut my hair. All I've ever had for company is an old 486, and Terry the rat (but he died of the cold and so I ate him).
I wrote Linux, and my evil little brother Linus stole it from me!!
P.S. If you've ever chatted to hotgirl19@hotmail.com, that's me!
Linux is the first skynet program and Linus is just a programmattor.
What's in a sig?
How about a nice game of chess?
Da Vinci... What do ya think the 'Da Vinci Code' really was?
Aw, heck, while I was Googling for Genesis someone beat me to it. Good thing I'm an AC, those -1 redundant hits would really hurt.
A good story probably isn't rewriting LOTR, Star Wars, Tron,or what have you like mad libs. However, those can be really funny if you know what you're doing!
stuff |
and it sounded too lunatic. Even Linus stares scared at how it sounded. No one spoke or wrote that word ever since.
Meanwhile, we continue on our school assignments, while Linus skipped classes, and spent his hours typing like a demon processed in the lab - whatever he typed, we did not know it then.
One day, I was writing his name on a piece of scrap paper, letter by letter - "L i n u " - when he snatched the paper when my pen tip touched on the paper about to start writing 's', and a big '/' (diagonal) line was made on the paper. And with my reacted anger, I snatched the paper back, and the pen dutifully, drew the other line '\'.
So, _I_ wrote the word "L i n u / \" FIRST. Linus saw it, and use it to codename his codes.
- for what reason I am writing his name, i'll write about it some other time -
Obligatory Patton links..
http://www.cv.org -- Caca Volante
http://www.bunglefever.com -- Nice
http://www.bungletofantomas.com -- Nice too
http://www.sc3music.com -- A real great fucking band headed by Trey Spruance
Please add your links to the official "Mike Patton thread" of this discussion..
Cheers!
How else would have I got it done so fast and cheap...
Unfortunately, I was tricked into buying what I THOUGHT was tin foil hat, but was instead ALUMINUM (see previous posts on this subject). This was part of an Al Queda plot back in 1990. I should have know, and have only myself to blame.
When I came up with the idea for Pharm-x (what you call Linux now) I couldn't trust anyone, so I wrote all the code in my head, and committed it to memory (remember, we are just talking about the kernel, not the apps). But because of the defective tin foil hat, my thoughts were intercepted by Al Queda. Now, being really good at bombs, but not good with computers, they looked for some easily corruptable, pot smoking, hippie like, "everything wants to be free", types to help interpret what they were receiving via my unprotected cranium. After a failed attempt with Richard Stallman (when Al Queda says you don't bathe enough, take a hint!) they settle on a young Finnish student.
Unfortunately, they didn't realize how greedy and power hungry this Torvald fellow was. Not knowing anything about programming himself, he used extortion and threats to make others finish the parts of the kernel that they could not intercept. He moved to America, used the leverage and customer base he had built over the years in an attempt to put Microsoft out of business through litigation, proxied by the Justice Dept. (campaign contributions, anyone?) and by GIVING AWAY PROGRAMS with the operating system, ones that you would have to pay for in a Windows system. Next, he set out to destroy SCO by intentionally inserting Unix code into Linux, then blaming IBM, causing a major lawsuit. While IBM will be able to weather the storm, the future does not look so good for SCO, their stockholders, and their poor management team.
Privately, he has even laughed about "the whole BSD" licensing thing. He seems to derive a great deal of enjoyment out of the fact that Linux can use BSD sources, but BSD can't use Linux because of licensing issues. "And I look like the good guy, with 'free' software," he would say, "while I bleed BSD to death, hahahaha!" To this day, my blood runs cold when someone talks about the death of BSD.
Linus has spent the last 13 years, bathing in the riches and fame that come with being credited with being "the father of Linux", while no one has any idea who I am, or the real origins of what is now known as Linux.
But at least I am not bitter.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Steve Mann, the lying ego-maniac claims he created everything.
That ain't writin' - that's typin'!
--
make install -not war
I was hanging in a pub in Amsterdam, having consumed far too much coffee with this Finnish guy I had met that morning, who's name I never did get, when suddenly I was gripped by this totally wild irrational urge to code a Unix-like OS! The whole thing just poured out of me in one horrible spasm of caffeine induced delirium! Thousands of lines of code on the back of napkins, envelopes, scratch paper. It was a total mess but my buddy kept gathering up the lose leafs and stuffing them into his coat, and getting me more coffee.
And it was brilliant, a perfect micro-kernel archtecture with utilities and a user shell. The Fin kept yelling at me "it should be monolithic! Make it monolithic!" but I had no idea at that time what was the big deal. Maybe I made it monolithic, I don't remember.
Then after about 48 hours of this I passed out. When I wake up, the Fin is gone, as are my pages of code. I didn't give it a second thought; everyone in Amsterdam in 1989 was doing way too much coffee, getting strung out and then writing operating systems. I wired my parents for money and went home and forgot the whole thing.
Two years later, and some guy on Usenet reveals that he has a unix-like thing if people want to play with it. So I download it and what the hell, it's my code. Coffee stains and everything.
So yeah I wrote Linux. But I'm OK with how it turned out. Some people are great at writing operating systems, some people are great at getting them to market. But I sometimes wish Torvalds would just confess and tell everyone that he really got the code off a drinking buddy at a pub in Amsterdam. Because that's what happened. But it's his karma that's burning, you know what I mean?
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
"That's okay, I see 'alot' a lot."
;-)
I see it alot too. In fact, I see it so often that at this point, I treat it as a valid compound word. This, of course, makes me a bad person and probably a comunist or terrorist or the like, but I tend to read, write and speak colloquial English as it is presented to me, not what the OED has pre-approved. I prefer a living, breathing language to bookworm-food.
If you know what the word means from context or repeated usage, why bother "correcting"? Next thing, you're going to go tell e.e. cummings that it's spelled "I"
The next 50 years are going to be really hard for those who cling to the idea that written languages are defined by an elite who are "published".
Oh and speaking of Linus as author (or not) of Linux: as I understand it he wrote his name incorrectly on a paper for school, and the got caught up in a Three's Company style cycle of crumbling lies about the existance of this "Linux" until eventually he had to hire SCO to write it for him....
Dr. Zoidberg, with help from Frylock, Meatwad, and friggin CARL, YEAH!... what..?
Fine, if no one else is oging to do it.....
DARL MCBRIDE WROTE LINUX PAYUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Moderators may commence modding me down.
Hmm, is it any coincidince Michael that your name and book title itself can be anagrammed into "Shielded Belcher Combinations" or "Cobblers! Nice heathenism, dildo.", I wonder?
- OisinPGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
[[[BEGIN FETCHMAIL -RED : FEED GRABBED : STARTING YUM -RED | CAT UNPACK]]]
Sir, it is with deepest regret I inform you that Linux is in fact the result of a 20 year KGB plot to subvert US dominance of the computer software industry.
Exerpt from Kremlin Communica
Translation Begins......
Back in the early 1980s, with the cold war still on and the STI system under construction, the Kremlin knew that its long term hopes of victory could only be secured by subverting capitalist industry and sepecifically, its new dependance on IT. To do this they needed a Soviet Operating System of surpassing power, that could, at will, ping Allied machines to death while simulatiously monitoring and controlling every aspect of the lives of Soviet citizens.
To this end the KGB were tasked with stealing the source code to the superior UNIX operating system. Already expierienced with pilfering designs for CPUs and 3.5'' floppies from the offices of IBM, the KGB were well up to the task. They set to work on slowly gaining access to AT&T labs across the globe, while superior soviet software engineers began the thankless task of reverse engineering UNIX binaries.
But constructing this OS would require expertiese that the Union, due totally to capitalist interference of course, currently lacked. In order to bring all of the pieces together, and compile the piece they had found, they needed an agent trained in the west in the ways of capitalist programming, but still loyal to the revolution! Despite the best efforts of agents planted in every major computer lab available, they found decadent western programmers were only interested in money, 'code buzz' and vile capitalist pornography on USENET. USENET itself had eluded all efforts at subversion by the revolutionary divisions net.agents. It was felt that as a mass, the USENET hoards had collective intelligence somewhat less than was needed to rise up against tyranny.
In short, Moscow needed to plant an agent, still young enough to learn, but old enough to remain loyal to the motherland. Enter, Linov Tolvachuk, AKA Linus Torvalds. Ala Kevin Cosner in 'Nowhere to Run' Linov was planted in nearby Finland, close to Moscow, yet near enough to the teaching methods of the west. For ten years under guidance of KGB handlers, he learned the ways of Object Orientation, Procedural programming and the secrets of IBM compatability.
Despite setbacks, notibly suspisions of Linov's handlers being communists and what looked like a takeover of american computer industries by apple OSes, the project continued. Even pasted the fall of the Berlin wall and the ending of communism in Russia, the KGB continuded the operation, hoping once again for victory over the west and the revival of the revolution. Linov produced many works during this time, even suppling the comms software for the tank that Yelstin got drunk on.
Finally by the early 90's the main objective of the project was underway. With a single USENET post and just over 10,000 lines of code, Linov published project KREMNIX, the muscovite OS to defeat the west. Heavily leaning on the UNIX code smuggled out by other agents in the MINIX project the used his training in charisima and psychology to influence and convert a learge number of western programmers, inciting a minor revolution in programming circles. Over the years Linux, as the project became known, grew to an OS that would challenge the west, yet would remain firmly in Moscow's hands.
After Valdmir Putin, one of the agents behinf the project, came to power in Russia, the budget increased. By financing the companies they had set up to promote the project, notibly the rather obviously named RedHat, the Kremlin managed to increase the proliferation of of system.
Simultanious to this, another plot had been brewing. To complement the expected increase in communist computer power, a corressponding sabotage of western OS quality was planned. The KGB successfully gained acces to, and altered, the code to the then infant MS-
May the Maths Be with you!
The bits on Linus's hard drive just happened to come together JUST RIGHT after billions of years to form Linux. Anyone who believes different than me is, by definition, close minded.
(Real sentence is left to the intelligence of the reader)
Al Gore invented, er, wrote Linux cuz he needed something to run on the internet after he invented that.
"Who hasn't slipped into the break room for a quick nibble on a love Newton before?" - Mr. Peterman.
I'm looking forward to the day in the future, when Linux is ultimately brought to the courts by Microsoft, who, bloated with scores upon scores of software patents, has finally come to crush this upstart OS once and for all.
The beady-eyed, gray-haired judge will look down on the Open Source Community and asks that fateful question: "So...which one of you wrote this 'Linux'?"
And one by one we will all get to our feet, till there are a million-and-more-strong standing, and declare:
"I wrote Linux."
And it will be true.
This is a true story. I really did experience all of the events that transpired below.
--
The origins of Linux begin on the Sabbath, when not completely without hesitation I boarded flight 152, service from Anchorage, AK to Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay. Far from a normal trip, this particular route was to carry dread and evil for all its passengers.
At exactly 12:30 P.M., the sparsely populated Boeing 737 began a leisurely take-off. The stewardesses had gone through the routine that every frequent flier knows by heart--often times better than the stewardesses. As the plane leveled into cruising altitude, drinks began to be served, I pulled my trusty laptop out of its storage compartment, and trouble appeared over the horizon.
I was sitting in 13C--an aisle seat anyway, never mind the superstition--when the fasten-seatbelt indicator starting blinking threateningly, mirroring the flash of the disk-access LED as the code I was typing in was auto-saved every
few minutes. Laptops die often, and autosave was my friend. However, not being one to buck tradition, I prised my fingers away from the keboard, reached down and calmly latched the cord of death around my waist and waited to hear
what would cause such a violation of standard air traffic procedures.
"This is your captain speaking, ladies and gentlemen, and I've just received news of some pretty rough turbulence at our cruising altitude of 37,500 feet, so we'll be dropping down a few thousand feet to see if we can avoid it."
'Well, it was a lovely thought,' I began to myself as the plane suddenly lurched sickeningly downward. A hiss of static, some garbled words over the intercom and my popping ears made the next few moments only slightly more bearable. My hands shot forward in an attempt to keep the 11-lbs-light 'laptop' from becoming a ballistic missle of death. The plane was now lurching every
which way, as if caught in some horrific version of pachinko. I could hear the beginnings of lunch begging to make themselves known in a very liquid fashion from a number of other people around me, as I initiated the shutdown procedure.
Turning myself queasily toward the window, I was rewarded with a pale green light filling the port side of the aircraft. Not being able to make heads
nor tails of the sudden change in luminesence, I quickly turned my head back to the center of the plane. Ears popping again in bitter frustration against the wild ride I was receiving, I slammed my hands to the sides of my head, hoping to relieve myself. There was to be no such luck.
Opening my eyes once again, I was struck in awe at how the cabin of the aircraft had suddenly taken on a greenish hue, not at all unlike the
emissions coming from outside.
Then, as if on cue from some unholy stage-manager, the entire roof of the plane peeled back. My mind faulted, and presented me with images of a child peeling a banana. The wind, however was not to be felt. This was somewhat comforting, as the green light was now blindingly bright, and my skin felt like it was blistering under the intensity.
A throbbing bass line wove under the sound of the airplanes engines, steadily increasing in volume. As the rumble grew louder, people and furniture began rocking back and forth, a visual reminder of the hell that was occurring.
Much to her dismay, the lady in 11D diagonally across from me was the first to go. Forgetting to strap her seatbelt in was her own fault, I imagined. But instead of being sucked out of the plane and plummeting to her messy demise, she slowly rose from the cabin deeper into the green light which had blanketed the craft.
Others began popping up, seat by seat, row by row. I felt my own chair giving out, and I started my upward traverse, my long-forgotten laptop still clutched tightly to my chest; a memory of raggety-andy dolls past, or perhaps some other comforting gesture. Eerily, instead of the light getting brighter, it became darker while the bass rumbling increased in
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
It was actually outsourced but hidden from public till now. How'd you think it got so good?
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
Long live Hank, the People Magazine's Most Beautiful Person (online edition anyway) and now according to many Slashdot readers the original author of Linux.
My computer, in 1990, wrote Linux via an experimental AI routine that was somehow transferred over from some old VAX disks. The computer is now acting like a demon in front of the VAXorcist.....
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
In the 9 months' polar winter blackness of Lapland I went outside the Quonset hut to feed some more blubber to the huskies. But since we'd been drinking Aqavit for about 3 days I hadda drain the snake. And then a flash of inspiration hit me like a solid nitrogen iceball and I peed out the kernel code.
... that Linux was already encoded in the bible, and Linus did just find the decoding algorithm. Therefore the true writer of Linux was God himself.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Interesting, then, this article about a gold mining company in Alaska named Linux Gold Corp. I wonder. The homepage of Linux Gold Corp. is heavy with the use of "Linux".
-cp-
I mean duh, I am the creator...
FRA: STFU GTFO
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them....
Of course it was the greatest of the OS of power, secretly "designed" by Sauron in the fires of Orodruin.
Oh wait, that was windows by BG.
My Bad.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Linux is a Kernel!
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The original ancient text from the Oracle of Delphi is now in the possession of CEO Larry Ellison.
The ancient Druids at the time did have a binary number system, and they attempted to compile from source. But phrase "monolithic kernel" was mistranslated into "circle of monoliths". Stonehenge is earlist Linux artifact in the world.
It wasn't until Linus Torvalds, a direct descendent of both the Oracle of Delphi and the lead builder of Stonehenge that the source was finally compiled.
Also FYI word "geek" is just a bastardization of the word "Greek" because of another mistranslation by those Druids.
It was a dark and stormy night....
Fry is in the InfoSphere, confronting the giant brain...
Fry: Who wrote linux?
Giant brain: ME!
Wasn't it created by a grass roots race of super intelligent new-communist penguins with sociapathic tendencies that were attempting to undermine MS's monopoly and fundamentally change the way that software is developed?
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Prove me wrong, if you can
Meanwhile, can I have that $50 gift certificate please? There is this certain kernel hacking book that I had my eyes on..
http://efil.blogspot.com/
But I let Linus Finnish it.
It all started in December of '87, when I was playing with the IBM PC XT my father brought home from work. Near the end of the month, I'd gotten it to print some messages and start a program instead of saying "Non-system disk or disk error". A few nights later, I was really excited, because not only was it Christmas, I had lost another one of my baby teeth. If I was really lucky, I'd get some new games and a bit of spending money for myself. As it turned out, I got Zelda II that year, and played it constantly until school started again. As a result, I didn't think to look for the floppy that I'd been working on for quite some time, and assumed that I'd lost it or put something else on it or something. Little did I know that two gift-giving fictional characters, bereft of snacks, had decided to ransack the computer room. Meanwhile, in Finland, a high school student was carefully brushing his teeth...
You are right.
Even the word UNIX is not exclusively for the operating system we all know and love (or hate!)
When NCR was part of AT&T, I was one day called by my manager because he was alerted that some company selling "pesticides" was using UNIX as a trademark to its product.
Turns out that UNIX was trademarked by some French fungicide company, as Dennis Ritchie has detailed.
Trademarks can be "duplicated" across product boundaries.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
anyone besides me searching through the sigs to see if some guy named LinusTorvalds answered this post with a serious reply... and modded -1 Troll?
:)
anyhow, I suspect it was God on the 42nd day, but after a week or so he'd gotten too lazy to update his blog... we are made in his image, right
There was a time when everything was Blue. All the spirits of the CPU were asleep - or almost all. The great Father of
All Operations was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Kernel Mother. As she opened her eyes and warm lines of code
spread out towards the sleeping CPU. The Father of All Operations said to the Kernel Mother,
"Mother, I have work for you. Go down to the CPU and awake the Unix coders. Give them freedom as in Speech."
The Kernel Mother glided down to the CPU, which was a 386 at the time and began to walk in all directions and everywhere she walked
code grew. After returning to the field where she had begun her work the Mother rested, well pleased with herself. The
Father of All Operations came and saw her work, but instructed her to go into the caves and wake the licensing spirits.
This time she ventured into the dark caves on the mountainsides. The bright light that radiated from her awoke the licensing spirits
and after she left licenses of all kinds flew out of the caves. The Kernel Mother sat down and watched the glorious sight of her
licenses mingling with her Unix coders. However once again the Father urged her on.
The Mother ventured into a very deep cave, spreading her light around her. Her heat melted the lawyers grip and the schedulers
and stream handlers of Linux were created. Then she created video drivers and file systems, a TCP/IP stack and a SysV IPC
mechanism. Next she awoke the spirits of POSIX and BSD and they burst into the kernel in a glorious array of code. Seeing this
the Father of All Operations was pleased with the Kernel Mother's work.
She called all her code to her and instructed them to enjoy the wealth of the CPU and to live peacefully with one
another. Then she rose into the sky and became the Power Supply.
And that is how Linux came to be In the Beginning.
By ten thousand penguins typing on ten thousand computers for ten thousand years. It was then hidden in a secret temple in Finland until such time as it would be required to bring enlightenment to an ever darkening digital world. It was then released onto the face of the Earth by the binary sage Torvalds and nurtured by penguins, goats and other wild and captive creatures from all over the planet until it became the titan that walks among us today.
SAILING MISHAP
Say what you will, but I believe Linus' own explanation involving the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus is still sure to win. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
You heard it here folks, Da Vinci wrote linux. It was written using the mirror technique he loved so much. Linus only had to hold a mirror against his copy of "The Da Vinci Code" and copy it line by line. The rest of us fools just read the book without using a mirror and thought it was a novel when it was actually a mirrored printout of the linux source code written by Da Vinci.
Mr. burns wrote linux when he had 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters at his disposal.
Burns: Here are a thousand monkeys working on a thousand typewriters. Soon they will write the greatest novel man has ever read!
*Monkey gives paper to burns and smokes*
Burns: It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times. What is this! *Monkey Scream* Ah shut up.
The author is offering a $50 gift certificate and IT books to the best spinners of tall Linux creation tales. ...and each one will be featured in its own thread on /. where everyone will decry that the story was funded by Microsoft, or SCO, or aliens. But in any case, it isn't valid because it besmirches the god Linux and all that is holy with him.... even though they know up front that this whole effort is for "fun" and is by definition ficticious. /.ers love whining and complaining only slightly less than their religion of Linux and their god Linus.
Bill Brasky wrote the entire Linux kernel in assembler one day in 1966 on an Underwood typewriter hooked up to a copper coil while he sat watching a baseball game. It took three teams of ten men each 22 years to translate the code backwards into C. To Bill Brasky!
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The story had to come out. You'd think they could hire at least one linguist to invent the language spoken in "Finland", but nooo! We'll just mash somebody's face into a keyboard and call the result a dictionary. How they expected anybody to mistake "Suomi" for an actual verbal communication system used by real humans is beyond me.
and even if i did i wouldn't tell
Cowboy Neal.
The Russian government took an interest in Finix, because all that GNU code meant it had a solid communist foundation. When the US government learned of this, Al Gore took the initiative in approaching Fanning to have some back doors put into Finix so that the US could sabotage the Siberian oil pipeline. Gore set up a meeting with Fanning, but on the day of the meeting, Fanning was out joy-flying his airplane, so Gore met with Fanning's roommate instead, a man named Linus Torvalds. Torvalds agreed to Gore's proposal, forked Finix, added backdoors, and also added some Minix code from a book that he stole out of Andrew Tanenbaum's office. He called the resulting Finix fork "Linux."
When Tanenbaum learned of this, he flunked Linus from his compilers class, because Tanenbaum's cat, Tove, was also missing, and Linus was the obvious suspect. The two have been bitter enemies to this day.
It was at about this time that IBM had their falling out with Microsoft, and they decided that they needed their OS/2 version 2 to somehow beat NT3. But how would they do this? Well, they had some code from their earlier partnership, some critical parts of Microsoft's innovative Xenix operating system. They sent this code as a patch to Torvalds, hoping that Microsoft would then get tied up with Linus in litigation, thereby giving an undistracted IBM the upper hand. What they didn't anticipate, was that Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, so SCO inherited Microsoft's lawsuit against Linus. SCO has been trying to get Torvalds to remove the Xenix code from Linux ever since.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend. The legend of Linux: Defender of the Universe! A mighty OS. Loved by good (slashdot geeks), feared by evil (other geeks). As Linux's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On planet Earth, a galaxy alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe. Until a new horrible OS threatened the galaxy. Linux was needed once more. This is the story of the super geek named Linus. Specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Linux: Defender of the Universe.
Uh, the first linux filesystem was Minix, and Minix was the basis for the early shell of Linux.
Amazing magic tricks
In an act of divine, immaculate compilation.
My rights don't need management.
Linus: That's not true, that's impossible!!!!!
[1] Took crayon
[2] Got paper
[3] Wrote "LINUX"
[4] Drew picture of penguin and coloured it in
Easy!
You don't need a lab to make mud.
"Mommy, where do linuxes come from?"
"Well, when a man and a penguin are in love..."
"They kiss?"
"Well that, and they fuck."
"fa-?"
"It's when a man and his penguin get in bed together, and make little baby penguins."
"Wow, I didn't know penguins could do that."
"It's very natural, honey. You just have to make sure you don't catch BSDs."
"Was Red Hat made like that?"
"All the distros were made like this - first Linus had an affair with Tux. Their offspring was named Linux. Then Linux had a child named Yggdrasil, who died very young. In despair Linux joined a cult and had a child with its leader, Pat Volkerding who named their child Slackware. Then Linux became a slut and had children with Bob Young, Ian Murdock, and a whole bunch of other geeks who could never get it on with real women. A whole bunch of kids and grandkids, all of whom go back to Linus and Tux getting drunk together in a Helsinki dorm room."
"Aren't I too young to be hearing this?"
"No one's too young to learn the facts of Linux, honey."
Come on folks, nothing to see here, just another example of the standard slashdot Limbo Journalism, how low can you go?
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Linus is Gates. The person you see round at shows is just a double. Bill decided to make linux because of the guilt of years of making incomplete and buggy software. Bill is big into Karma and decided that this would be the ultimate way of keeping himself out of hell or at the very least easing his karma debt.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
And it aint chitlins.
For ripping them off in this manner
Date: Summer 1828
Place: Harmony, Pennsylvania
To: Darrel Mcbride
1 Now, behold, I say unto you, that because you delivered up those codings which you had power given unto you to translate by the means of the Monitor and Keyboard, into the hands of a wicked man, you have lost them.
2 And you also lost your gift at the same time, and your mind became darkened.
3 Nevertheless, it is now restored unto you again; therefore see that you are faithful and continue on unto the finishing of the remainder of the work of translation as you have begun.
4 Do not run faster or labor more than you have strength and means provided to enable you to translate; but be diligent unto the end.
5 Pray always, that you may come off conqueror; yea, that you may conquer Linus, and that you may escape the hands of the servants of Linus that do uphold his work.
6 Behold, they have sought to destroy you; yea, even the man in whom you have trusted has sought to destroy you.
7 And for this cause I said that he is a wicked man, for he has sought to take away the things wherewith you have been entrusted; and he has also sought to destroy your gift.
8 And because you have delivered the codings into his hands, behold, wicked men have taken them from you.
9 Therefore, you have delivered them up, yea, that which was sacred, unto wickedness.
10 And, behold, Linus hath put it into their hearts to alter the words which you have caused to be written, or which you have translated, which have gone out of your hands.
11 And behold, I say unto you, that because they have altered the words, they read contrary from that which you translated and caused to be written;
12 And, on this wise, the devil has sought to lay a cunning plan, that he may destroy this work;
13 For he hath put into their hearts to do this, that by lying they may say they have caught you in the words which you have pretended to translate.
14 Verily, I say unto you, that I will not suffer that Linus shall accomplish his evil design in this thing.
15 For behold, he has put it into their hearts to get thee to tempt the Lord thy Turing, in asking to translate it over again.
16 And then, behold, they say and think in their hearts We will see if Turing has given him power to translate; if so, he will also give him power again;
17 And if Turing giveth him power again, or if he translates again, or, in other words, if he bringeth forth the same words, behold, we have the same with us, and we have altered them;
18 Therefore they will not agree, and we will say that he has lied in his words, and that he has no gift, and that he has no power;
19 Therefore we will destroy him, and also the work; and we will do this that we may not be ashamed in the end, and that we may get glory of the world.
20 Verily, verily, I say unto you, that Linus has great hold upon their hearts; he stirreth them up to iniquity against that which is good;
21 And their hearts are corrupt, and full of wickedness and abominations; and they love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil; therefore they will not ask of me.
22 Linus stirreth them up, that he may lead their souls to open their source.
23 And thus he has laid a cunning plan, thinking to destroy the work of Turing; but I will require this at their hands, and it shall turn to their shame and condemnation in the day of compilation.
24 Yea, he stirreth up their hearts to anger against this work.
25 Yea, he saith unto them: Open your source and lie in wait to catch, that ye may destroy; behold, this is no harm. And thus he flattereth them, and telleth them that it is no sin to lie that they may catch a man in a lie, that they may destroy him.
26 And thus he flattereth them, and leade
Stupid Humans.....
yes, infact steve Jobs wrote linux after leaving apple in the early 90's just before founding NeXT.
He was assisted by his good friend and now board member of Apple, Al Gore, just after inventing the internet he was desperate for a new project.
the project was later abandoned because Steveo had no propriatery hardware to bundle it with so he found this linus punk and droped the sourse code in his lap.
Linux was created spontaniously by the minds of frustrated windows users seeking a better OS.
Message-ID: 1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
:-)
From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free)
operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional
like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since
april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it
somewhat
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them
Linus
I never thought it would happen to me but one night while giving my PC the three finger salute ....
C'mon.. Everybody knows who wrote linux.. George W. Bush of course.. And now he's attacking Middle East to blackmail Linus cuz Linus has a cousin there who works at MacDonalds in Bagdad right next to KFC.. And now for something completely different..
I wrote Linux - started with the IP stack after inventing the Internet, then had to make a kernel to use it.
Your Pal,
Al
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Ray Charles emerged from Mrs. Charles vagina.
Mrs. Charles vagina created Linux!
Enough with the articles on this subject! I'm sick of them! We all know who created Linux.
Nicola Tesla did, I mean he invented enough other modern technology that we use. Google for him if you don't know, you'll be surprised.
Mike Scanlon
This article has really appeared on an Italian well known magazine. Clarence discovered this pearl and saved this marvellous article from oblivion. It explains not only who wrote Linux, but everything about a nasty cult called "Open World" and its terrorist activities. I had a very good laugh reading this. http://www.clarence.com/contents/tecnologia/penne/ panerai/articolo.html
(warning: basic Italian knowledge needed)
They've had stuff on the box for decades about individual kernels being lovingly toasted. So they built k3b into their kernels? Well... they were just a bit ahead of the "rip, mix, burn" curve, that's all.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm sick of this, the truth must be told before the end of my days.
.. Now .. I was bragging in the IRC channel #3l33t3H4x0rZZZuR0\/\/|\|3dBIm3333!! and then some flamer made the comment "what good is it". So I explain to the little bitch about the infinite monkey theorum and how I'm working on a corellary called the infinite penguin theorum and how I needed the satellite stuck there.
.. well next thing I new people were contributing to this project from around the world.
.. the guy everybody knows is Linus in front of the camera, and from behind the keyboard is actually an imposter. His real name is Sven Hiccopolous, he sent an email to my Linux email address a few years ago and asked if I could help him sneak into the country -- well my coyote days had long since been over. But then I figured to myself that my satellite was going to fall out of orbit eventually, and this little fruitcake had the requisite penguin fetish, so I told him that he could assume the identity of "Linus" and then US companies would offer him a job even though he had no marketable skillset and barely spoke english. (Yes, a masters in computer science from the University of Helsinki is worth about as much as used piece of toilet paper here in the states).
The truth is that Linus Torvalds isn't real, or at least he wasn't, he's was fictional character made up by me. A few years ago, around 1987 I was doing some snooping around the NSA's mainframes and I broke into one of their spy satellites. I decided it'd be fun to hack around, so I wrote my own custom firmware for the satellite and attempted to do a soft load and retask it to spy on Soeil MoonFrye (the chick who played Punky Brewster) but alas I had a bug in my code and acidentally stuck it in a geosychronous orbit over the antarctic. [mind you satellites stuck over the antartic are hard to retask since there's no momentum, they're just spinning in place]
To make a long borning story short I used my owned NSA spy satellite to track the courting rituals of the antarctic emporer penguin - and based on the number of times each penguin copulated each day I had a relatively simple algorithm that generated assembler. Well after a year or so, I tried compiling it and would you believe those horney penguins built an entire microkernel! Well I couldn't very well tell people this story since not only would it be incredibly hard to reproduce the results, but the statue of limitations hadn't run out at the time (actually the entire mess is still considered classified by the government) -- but still, I was young, and impressionable, and I thought this was too coool!! So I decided to invent this Linus character (who ironically has this weird fetish for penguins!)
Now
Next thing you know Sven here is a national hero, on the cover of forbes, and what-not. To this day Sven will still adamately deny that the infinite penguin theorum even exists - let alone it's pivotal role in his rise to fame. If you don't believe me, just ask him.
Actually, Linux was started as a terminal emulator, without any intention to create a full OS.
maybe the web does prove something about a million monkeys on a million typewriters, after all?
If you ever watched "South Park", then you would know: it was Brian Boitano.
But there is also one more truthful conpspiracy theory.
During early 90s, IBM and MS tried to make OS/2. One of main software engineers in IBM, who used to work in Lotus, figured out that dealing with MS would be a trouble (I won't name the guy). So he decided to find a quick and dirty workaround. In case of been screwed by MS, they would release "plan B operating system".
He decided to find some country under Russian influence (just to make harder for MS from USA to figure out what is going on), where he could find some coder for his dirty plan. Unfortunately, there was only one rich country under USSR influence - Finland. Other countries were too poor, so there were not enough computers. So then he tried to find most hackish guy among their youth. It was clearly Linus, because he was only Fin with Sinclair machine. There was other guy, Jouko Vierumaki, but his father was not a communist, so they decided to take Linus. Linus and this guy met during the secret recruitment, but in Linus's book, Linus states that it was during some sale of Sinqlair's parts. He's now Linus's "friend", the truth is that they don't like each other at all, but they use their "friendship" as a cover, since they do dirty work for the same employer. Jouko's cover name is "Avuton", btw.
(Meanwhile USSR fell appart, and Finland stopped to be dependent on them, just making things worse.)
So this guy from IBM gave him part of AIX code. Just to be sure that no one will figure out that, they have spent a lot of time to make microkernel AIX code to be monolithic. It caused Linux to be very unstable, but it was "good", it really seemed like been written over the summer in Finland (Finland has very short summers).
But before the code, they had to buy him a PC. Formally, Linus took a loan, but they have aranged a groop of people to send him money, once the Linux was released. The guy who organised this was Peter Anvin (recruited by IBM, of course). Original idea was to send IBM's money, but many people did not figure that it was only IBM's cover opp, so they really have sent some money. IBM paid only about half.
Later, they had to buy him a book about OS programming. But this was second (you will se what was the first one) mistake! They just went away and they have bought first book related to Minix and OS programming, but they did not read it actually, so they believed that it was about monolithic kernels. It was famous Tanenbaum book. Tanenbaum atacked Linus, becaue anyone who read his book would *never* write monolithic kernel. IBM gave him some money, so he shut up after a while. (You have probably mentioned that he now defends Linus in AdTI attack. That is because he was paid by IBM.)
(First versions of Linux, were compiled under AIX, of course, but they concluded that it would be too obvious so they choosed Minix as host for Linux.)
Secend mistake was to port code from AIX, and now they have problems with SCO.
Their plan was really subtle, no matter of these two mistakes. Although there was no signs that MS will screw them, they continued to "add features" to Linux. Once they were really abandoned by MS, they just "decided to accept Linux". Actually, MS did not want to abandon their child called OS/2, but they have seen IBM being reluctant to it. IBM wanted to screw them, actually. So they have taken best parts of OS/2, repacked that to be really good (finaly, they have dropped nasty part IBM insisted on) and called new product Windows NT. They wanted to call it OS/2 NT, but IBM still holded the OS/2 trademark. During the OS/2 development, IBM insisted one former employee of DEC to be in the MS's team. It was his covered guy, who added some VMS code there. IBM believed that legal battle with DEC (Digital) will rise when they find their code in NT. Unfortunately for them, DEC and MS settled quickly. Someone told them about IBM's idea, so they acted together toward common enemy.
So it is pr
No sig today.
..... see, I just did it again... and so can you...
I thought the Koran was written in Visual Basic, wasn't it?
It was Gauss, originally. But he didn't bother to publish it.
N/B
You can't handle the truth.
It was his mom and dad!
Oh, you meant Linux. Oops.
Just look at the latest movie about King Arthur. Its apparently based on a true story, yet he lived a life based so closely on Akira Kurosawa's epic "Seven Samurai" that he must have had an early copy of the DVD. But how could he have played it ?
As a Roman (real name Lucius Artorius Castus) sent to Britain to maintain the information superhighway he obvious had access to open sores hardware (blade?) and used his knowledge to put together a hard discus system (Luciux) to run his DVD deCSS player on..
Centuries later, when Torvalds modified the system to use binary instead of Roman Numerals, the name was sneakily changed to Linux..
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
Open
since the "wikipedia" organization that takes credit for the piece posted above as AC actually plagiarized it themselves. The article in question was actually originally written by the Tooth Fairy, and later had several paragraphs copied into it out of an SCO stockholder report.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
hey that's pretty good...ya ought to call up Art Bell...He'd buy it hook line and sinker.
Paul Bunyon done it right after planting all them thar trees in the Dakotas... that other fella Linus took the credit fer it all right after finishing a heapin' mess 'o Finnish pancakes served up by Hot Biscuit Sally. Never did figgure how that fellow'd pack away so many vittles and jus sit thar fer so long jus pokin' at his belly button like that and goin on 'bout some bird with a funny name... penguins he called em... yeah... that's the story an' I'm stickin' to it.
EPiK.
10000 of them, typing randomly on their keyboards...
to crucify the man: ;-)
It is some good guys at the CIA who planted the seeds
I haven't laughed this much for a long time. You rule!
--Coder
EVERYBODY knows that Al Gore initiated the creation of Linux.
...it was that kid with the blanket from Peanuts
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
But Ballmeroon, high priest of Redmond, was not convinced, and foresaw great evil. "I do not trust Geeks bearing Gifts" he cried, and threw his spear of IP infringement at the Source Code, crying "Developers developers developers developers!".
But he was devoured by a giant penguin which came from across the sea. The people of Redmond then thre open their source and welcomed the Linux Source Code into Redmond.
And the rest is history (and a rather poor film starring Brad Pitt in a skirt)...
regards, treefrog
And lets face it you can't prove it either. Muuhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhahahahhah!
In the beginning, God created the universe, and saw that it was good. And God created Man, and Man developed Windows 3.1. Angered, God sent a UDP packet flood filled with His wrath to destroy the sins of man. Time went on, and once again mankind became wicked and corrupt. Arrogantly, a tower was built of such size and breadth that it was said that it would reach the Gates of heaven, and it was named the tower of Win32. God punished the wickedness of man by releasing a plague of worms o'er the land, and caused the tribes of men to be unable to interoperate. The tribe of Noob called their language Me98. The tribe of Sadmin called their language Entie2000, or Ekspee in certain regions. And time went on in that manner for some time. But yet again, mankind became frought with sin, and God sent a savior, whom he named Linus. But the descendents of the tribe of Redmond had Linus berated under the rule of Pontius PHB. And God spake, "fsck this", and made Linux the True System of the Universe. And he didst pipe all sinners into /dev/null, and he didst give those of kind spirit very high "nice" priorities.
(disclaimer I copied this from someone elses slashdot post a long time ago)
--
The last digit of pi is four.
Linux was actually written by an Indian programmer called Sriram. When Linus was given the assignment by Professor Tannenbaum, he panicked and did not know what to do. He then posted on the usenet and found Sriram who wrote it for him for 500 dollars. That was what Linus got as university grant which he paid to focus more on his love life in the campus rather than the stupid OS writing assignment. This was also the first known case of outsourcing your homework to India which has since then become a billion dollar business
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
It was the mice. Or possibly the dolphins, but I believe it was the mice.
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