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Linux Turns 17 Today
Meshach writes "Over at the Linux Journal, Doc Searles is noting that today marks 17 years since Linus posted to Usenet, starting Linux (post). As a Linux user at work and at home I say, thanks Linus!" The anniversary is also featured on the top page of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
One more year and it should be legal.
[insert witty sig here]
..until Microsoft can legally fuck Linux in the asshole... these days though it seems like Linux is going to be the one "giving it". Smile Balmer :)
It is currently meant for hackers
OMG SHUT IT DOWN!!!
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
No google logo for this?! I expected a penguin or something like that.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
HURD turned 18 this year (22 if you count the first failed attempt).
There was a *successful* attempt?????
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Its called Ubuntu and he is supposed to be 60 years old and lives as a zoo keeper, naming all of his projects after various animals there.
I don't think it was meant to be a history lesson. If you're looking at the fact linux is 17 today, then you know what linux is. I kinda think, and this isn't one of Doc's better articles, it's saying where Linux is now at the moment and where it may go?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
"The anniversary is also featured on the top page of the Encyclopedia Britannica"
Britannica is overrated, wake me when it make the first page of wikipedia ;-)
"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane" -PKD
Congrats! 17 years and almost 2% of the market share. This is the year!
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Somebody indulge me, but why is the *17th* birthday of the kernel worthy of main page? Slow news day?
15, 20, 25, etc. yes. But 17?
Open Source is full of guys with huge egos, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't see any difference between Linus and say, RMS.
Then again, at least Linus is a good coder...
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Time keeps flowing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I'd say he (Linus) is far far more humble than Gates, Ballmer, Ellison et al. In fact, I should add that I rather think RMS is shy and retiring compared to those guys.
Ya frigging Stallman. While he may be a bit off his rocker... he only created the license Linux currently uses, as well as the compiler it was created with. Other than that, a COMPLETE hackjob.
Or did you conveniently forget that it's GNU/Linux? Without Stallman you likely wouldn't have Linux at all.
Yeah, that time they got malloc to work. Because that's totally all you need for a working OS.
No, but you could still have Free/Net/Open BSD, though. So what, really, would be the loss?
Of course, gcc is really the engine that makes all our worlds revolve these days.
"First failed attempt" implies nothing about a later successful attempt. It just points out that you need an ordinal to tell which of the many failed attempts was meant.
Or did you conveniently forget that it's GNU/Linux?
Ahem, did *you* conveniently forget that it's [Mozilla|Konqueror]/OpenOffice.org/KDE/QT/[X.org|XFree86]/GNU/Linux?
"Barely Legal"
I record my sleeptalking
Obligatory:
1991 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1992 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1993 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1994 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1995 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1996 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1997 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1998 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1999 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2000 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2001 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2002 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2003 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2004 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2005 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2006 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2007 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2008 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!
Stupid whitespace filter, yadda yadda
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Mod down? No. But there's an important distinction: to get technical excellence, you have to have some way to filter out technical mediocrity. Therefore, in an environment demanding technical excellence, those who are technically mediocre will feel slighted and rejected.
Building excellence is not about "feeling good", a bunch of hairy hippies sitting around in Buddha style kumbaya. It's about building excellence, and it's not always pretty.
Linus is very forward and very direct; a display of the confidence that comes from years of proven experience producing and overseeing real, valuable excellence. He's OK with stating his opinion very openly and succinctly, confident that if his ideas are wrong, they'll be picked apart ruthlessly and publicly.
Linus has done an amazing job of coordinating an insane amount of information in one of the largest, most complex, and most distributed project ever attempted by mankind. And he accepts that his ideas are only valuable if they are RIGHT by the standards of excellence.
I don't care if he is "polite", he is an amazing fellow simply because he's OK with being wrong, and puts his ego in 2nd place after technical excellence!
This is the hallmark of good science and good engineering: when who has the right answer is less important than what's the right answer!
Hugs to Linus!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The right date is September 17th, not October 5th. But year after year people keep messing it up. Don't believe me, look here
I'm commenting on the Britannica article that I clicked through to. It wasn't written by Doc. It's written by some guy called Anthony Craine, who I have never heard of.
Britannica is supposed to be "high quality" (because it was when I was a wee tyke when it was only available in dead-tree edition).
I guess I should have been more clear.
--
BMO
It's GoogleApps/IceWeasel/X.org/GNU/Linux, you insensitive clod.
Yeah, that time they got malloc to work. Because that's totally all you need for a working OS.
It's all Emacs needs, anyway.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Like how people conveniently forget that it wasn't published under the GPL until late 1992. Or that it can currently be compiled with at least one compiler other than GCC. Or that it's possible to run it with a modified *BSD userland and non-glibc C library. But yeah, aside from that, it's all Stallman's doing...
Ah, you forgot to mention that RMS has created an operating system long before Linux existed :)
1) Writing a license doesn't require you to be a good coder.
2) The original GCC was so poor that they eventually gave up on it and instead used EGCS, which was a much better fork of the same software which they then merged back in to GCC. I will go on to quote another Slashdot user who had the misfortune of working on some of his code:
I know from personal experience that he is a control freak. All "official sanctioned" GNU code is owned by him, by copyright assignment. It is not enough for software to be under the GPL. My only direct experience was a phone call right after I had taken over the job of Mr. XEmacs and he told me how he must "wage war" (direct quote) against me and XEmacs because even though we were true blue GPL, he must have FSF copyright assignment.
The Emacs source code which we inherited and forked is littered with 1000+ line functions, 6+ levels of nested if-else and assorted other crap that looks like it was being written to violate as many rules of good programming style as possible. The amount of time it took to get the code in a state where we could display CJK fonts in Emacs (and in a stable state) was staggering, especially considering that we were basing our work off the good folks' at ETL Mule.
I have no respect for the man, no respect for his (programming) work. I find the names Linux/GNU and worse GNU/Linux to be as childish and offensive as the children who like to write Micro$oft and M$ and similar crap. (You might as well also write "you can't spell gOatse without the Gates and a big O". It's equally as witty.) Anyone can develop userland tools. Only a handful of people, of which Richard is NOT one, can develop a successful kernel.
So, my point stands - Linus is a good coder. Stallman is not.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
GNU is 24 years old, preceding Linux by 7 years.
This makes me think of GNU as some kind of Frankenstein monster.
And now, Igorrrr... let's put the brrrrain into my arrrtificial GNUuu. Inserrrrt the penguin brrrrain!
- Yesh, Doctor Shtallman.
Not free software! When Linux was first announced and released it was not free software. It became free in 1992 when Linus rereleased it under the GNU GPL. (See the release notes for version 0.12.)
Join the Free Software Foundation
I remember printing earlier versions on an old Okidata tractor fed serial printer. I think it was V 0.91.
Of course I had to do some coding to get the printer to form feed, but that's what it cost back then to be on the bleeding edge.
/you had to put the printer in compressed mode first because some of the lines were too long.
<sigh> There was a lot to learn in that code. For an eager student it was like being a kid in a candy store. And much of it was very, very bad.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix.
This brings tears to my eyes...
I didn't know, that Hurd was already in development back than...
And 17 years later... it's still not done...
Even the Firefox spell checker does not know it... It recommends "Turd". *lol*
Hey, it does not know "Firefox" too. Oh well...
Think of what happened if Linus had waited* for Hurd instead...
[* Is that correct English? It's not my first language... I don't know...)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I think you are underestimating the influence of the GPL in the success of GNU/Linux. Knowing that some slimy corporation wasn't able to take your contribution, close it off and sell it made the whole deal far more palatable. There's no way I would contribute without the protections offered by the GPL license and I know I'm not alone in having that attitude. The only thing worse than working for a corporation is working for them for free.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
I bet you think you're really hardcore not using a window manager, but let me know when you're hard enough to use GoogleApps/Lynx/GNU/Linux.
A lot of Linux development is done by companies such as IBM and many others. They contribute back only because the GPL says it's the only way to play. Had it been BSD, they would rather keep their drivers (as they do in Windows), and distribute them with their hardware—it would be a binary blob nightmare. There are indeed binary blobs for Linux, but are more the exception than the rule.
Without the GPL, engineers cannot justify giving back code done on company time in front of their employers. Sure, BSD would be there, but would be nowhere as successful as Linux.
A lot of BSD developers are nice people, willing to give their work for nothing in return (no irony nor paternalism intended here; it's a good character trait); however, there are far more cheapskates around than white knights in shining armour.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
2) The original GCC was so poor that they eventually gave up on it and instead used EGCS, which was a much better fork of the same software which they then merged back in to GCC.
Sorry, but this is the wrong argument. EGCS broke away because Richard Kenner was a crappy GCC maintainer. It was also driven in the fact that "official" GCC could not successfully compile the Linux kernel at the time. HJ Lu made forks of libc and gcc in order to support building Linux systems.
The HJ Lu gcc fork was separate from EGCS and ended when EGCS was established.
Otherwise, OK and that random slashdotter you quoted was me.
...coz, lord knows, it was an ugly baby.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
No problem. Your points are valid.
It's easier to make a case that Stallman has been hindering the advancement of Linux, rather than helping it.
No one other than the handful of people who already had our own private versions of hand rewritten versions of Unix utilities really care anyway. Desktop users do not.
And as to programming skills ... I do not think of Linus as the very best programmer in the Linux kernel world today (I'd rate AKPM, Al Viro and Davem higher), he's very good ... but as a manager and arbiter of programming taste, he gets top score. He knows how to trust people and delegate responsibility and get things done at a rate I would have considered impossible 10 years ago.
Which is why RMS complements him very well. It is not about liking one guy over the other, or having the whole debate about who is the best.
:
Those 2 guys are the sword and shield Linux, one without the other makes no sense. Yes, I could see Linus aiming for some approximation of free software, but not with the fervor or excellence that RMS has done it. Yes I can see RMS making some software in accordance with his beliefs about free software, would it be Linux? No, I do not think so.
A bit of a badly applied Einstein quote here, but you get the meaning
Religion without Science is blind.
Science without Religion is lame.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Does anything make RMS happy? So far not seen much signs of any happiness in the man.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Linus is very forward and very direct; a display of the confidence that comes from years of proven experience producing and overseeing real, valuable excellence. He's OK with stating his opinion very openly and succinctly, confident that if his ideas are wrong, they'll be picked apart ruthlessly and publicly.
Oh please, I've seen enough of his posts to know he can be plain old rude and at times borderline insulting, at least to be a mailing list smackdown. On the other hand, those on the recieving end have mostly deserved it like blatantly ignoring the release process and what's acceptable patches for an RC. And he takes it in good stride when people he does get "picked apart ruthlessly and publicly", though it doesn't happen often. You can dismiss technical mediocracy with a little more tact, but all in all it's better that he's right and rude than wrong and courteous.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings