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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]
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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 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
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