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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]
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.
Don't mistake the word "hacker" for what the ill-informed media use it to mean. It is the popular media that have given the term a negative meaning, and then only in recent years. It WAS a positive term, and STILL IS to those who know what it really means.
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.
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.
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 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.