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Happy Birthday, Linus

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the slow-news-day dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"

9 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. A case of the pundays by suso · · Score: 5, Informative

    How would the world look different? It would be a whole GNU world.

    BTW, Linus is 40 today, there seems to be no mention of that anywhere.

  2. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by tepples · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?

    Not much different, as the people who built Linux distributions would instead have ported GNU to the kernel of FreeBSD.

    1. Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by eln · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's also at least a small chance that many of the kernel hackers who work on Linux today would have been working on the Hurd kernel. As it happened, the release of Linux essentially killed Hurd, although it's technically still around.

    2. Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by chrb · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just because of the permissive license?

      Partly - commercial BSD derivatives and the BSD networking stack ending up in Windows 95 put off some developers - who wants to see their work being co-opted by Microsoft and other corporations in closed source products? Some people no doubt, but not the majority. Another effect of the licensing was that BSD splintered into different, slightly incompatible commercial forks. The GPL protected Linux from that fate - the free distributions were shipping more-or-less exactly the same kernel code as the commercial distributions - the general perception was that with Linux free didn't mean "less", it just meant "no telephone support". In BSD land, "free" (to many) meant "not as good as what Sun and IBM are selling".

      Another factor was that BSD was seen by some Europeans as being controlled by some American labs and American universities. This made it seem less approachable - and harder to get your code into. Linus, in contrast, welcomed good patches with open arms. Linus was highly enthusiastic about people developing code for his kernel. The same enthusiasm for outsiders was not visible within the BSD community.

      Yet another factor was the number of Linux distributions that sprung up. Competition is good - Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. were all competing to make the best Linux distribution, and there were numerous other distributions trying to push them from the top. In contrast, BSD was more centrally controlled, and whilst there was some competition between distributions, there wasn't a great amount. Plus the licensing made forks more likely - with GPL and Linux, if someone wrote a good patch, it was highly likely that patch would end up in all Linux distributions fairly rapidly. The same could not be said of BSD and its various commercial forks.

    3. Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That's only partly true. In '94 BSD was even or ahead of Linux in terms of features. The reason Linux ended up "the winner" is because there was a stark difference between the two communities in welcoming newbies into the fold. #unix was the place to go on IRC for abuse. In stark contrast, the folks on #linux were very patient and helpful.

      I had both 386BSD and Slackware downloaded to floppy. I ended up running Linux because I was welcomed by the Linux community. Not so much with the BSD crowd. A little kindness is all it took to make Linux the world's most popular Unix OS.

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
  3. Re:over 40 by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is he going to invent anything else? Or after 40 do you just give up on life?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Authority_on_Linux
    "About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself.[13] Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.[18]"

    Do you know how much output that is?! Also, consider for a minute, that Linux isn't like the lightbulb, invent once and the work is done. How far would linux have gone if work quit in 1991, 1995, 2000? It's a work-in-progress.

    The world is littered with half-assed and half-finished projects, particularly software. It's far better that Linus brings and continues one project to excellence than do a dozen mediocre projects that quite never get there.

    Maybe you should go out and invent something. If it had 1/100 of the impact Linux has, you'll the world for the better significantly.

  4. Re:over 40 by jo42 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone knows "42" is the real milestone.

  5. Re:over 40 by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Linus invented 'git' much more recently, in 2005. If you haven't reviewed it for source control, and compared it to Subversion at Subversion's expense, I urge you to do so. It is lighter weight, _far_ faster, allows remote development far more easily, and actually pays attention to security with its far better handling of SSH keys and its built-in GPG signatures for software tags.

    I can also attest that you only give up on life at 40 if your first 40 years weren't worth living. And in that case, your age probably wasn't the problem.

  6. Re:No coprocessor... by dotgain · · Score: 5, Funny
    That's the first time I've ever heard this, but I'll believe it. Nothing, I repeat nothing, will ever surprise me about the evolution of x86 any more.

    If you were to tell me that Little Endianness was simply the result of someone putting something on an overhead projector the wrong way, I'd believe you (because it seems like an extremely fucking stupid idea otherwise: "2 ^ 16 equals five-hundred-thirty-six, sixty-five thousand"

    If you were to tell me that the Pentium was really 64-bit, but the fabricators never hooked up the address pins because they never got the memo, I'd believe you.

    No doubt, x86 is the cheapest, fastest and most prevalent CPU in computers today, and probably always will be, but fuck me if it doesn't look like the biggest kluge in the world.