May the source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Softpanorama: (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society
Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers
For readers with high sensitivity to grammar errors access to this page is explicitly prohibited :-)
Linus Torvalds - The one, the only ... yeah! Stampede distribution developers "If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. Source: comp.os.linux.advocacy |
Contents
The life at a glance (of an accidental neo-conservative revolutionary ;-)
Selling Bazaar to Cathedral (Linux Hype Festival and IPO Gold Rush)
Linux Stocks Crush, Outsourcing wave and the Sunset of Linux Hype
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matt 6:24 |
| "There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth" |
Linux like Unix in general is a major democratic OS and a major democratic social force in computing despite the fact that the development of the kernel is ruled with iron fist by Linus Torvalds. Unix was one of the first a democratic operating system that helped people to get rid of the power of the corporate and university "computer center" bureaucracy and Linux continues this tradition along (in fierce and not always successful competition with FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other BSD flavors). I think that one of the main achievement of Linux is it's counterbalancing value and positive influence on Microsoft that contributed to the lessening what is called the "operating system tax" (while the cost of Microsoft OSes in the USA is very competitive, this is not true for other countries). And this influence of Linux on Microsoft is important for developing countries, because PCs in those countries very often contain components for which Linux drivers are non-existent.
At the same time Linux itself should be viewed as a classic story of commercialization of GPL-based software and this commercialization to a certain extent betrayed academic roots of free/open source software. Paradoxically despite the fact that due to the commercialization the character of the movement radically changed and it became corporate-controlled, most members of the Linux community still exhibit the characteristics of "true believers" - they cannot accept criticism of their belief object, and will, given the opportunity, pour scorn and derision on the proponents of alternatives, or even on those who simply don't believe in the object of their blind faith. This chapter also documents the phenomenon that later was coined as the Fading Altruism of Open Source Development and very strong corporate influence on Linux development including IPO rip-offs (Linux gold rush) and big business manipulation of technical priorities and goals.
I would like to remind the reader that this is a skeptical notes. The analysis below not only lacks typical for "true believers" excessive excitement about the technical qualities of Linux kernel, but has a definite anti "cult of personality" flavor. I hope this page can serve as a antidote to "Great Chairman Linus Torvalds who single-handedly leads lemmings toward the bright future" stories in mainstream media.
Contrary to naive (or crooked) accounts about shy Finn, Linus has a "supersized" (but well camouflaged in public appearances ;-) ego and as you can infer from the facts presented below it was always the case. Both Linus' parents are journalists, and he probably inherited a journalistic talent and understands pretty well how important is to project the right public image of humbleness to create contrast that increases a "superhero effect". To get a better sense of him, read the kernel traffic list. In this list he's far from the laid-back, mellow regular guy as he usually appears in the interviews. He is very opinionated and extremely competitive to the point of being very rude to people dissenting from his "party line"; he is perfectly capable in flaming people, solutions or ideas he doesn't like even when those are better ideas or solutions.
I also think that Linus' cult of personality is one of the most significant negative moments in the movement for various reasons propagated by such different people/groups including but not limited to Eric Raymonds, Slashdot founders, Slate's Andrew Leonard, Linux distributors, etc. That's why this chapter can be considered as a modest attempt to address this issue. All-in-all in this chapter I will try to paint a vivid picture of a talented, colorful and sharply individualistic Linux dictator: one of the most fascinating figures among open source pioneers. It's important to understand that this chapter was written as an antidote to publications emulating North Korean party newspapers articles that depict achievement of the party leaders with just substitution of Linux and Linus Torvalds in several places ;-).
Along with this goal, this chapter also tries to answer another two important questions
We also will mention the irony of the Linux development. When in 1991, Linus Torvalds created a tiny OS, a nameless prototype that later became Linux, it was an act of rebellion against the commercial software and hardware giants who were raking in millions of dollars a year from their closely protected operating systems and hardware.
Who would have thought that, less then one decade later, the same giants he sought to undermine would give him (via Linux startups that they financed) stock options and he embraces this opportunity to became rich with a passion Don Juan would have envied. That he will peddle the stock of one of the most closed and secretive chip developers. And that IBM, a pretty controversial technical giant, the company that was hated in 80th much more than Microsoft now will, become the godfather of Linux and set up a billion dollars fund to grow its (partially outsourcing-based) technical consultant business. Who would ever think that Linux would simultaneous become symbol of both "brain drain" from Europe and the symbol of programming jobs outsourcing ?
This mixture of commercialization and outsourcing presented some interesting moral problems and challenges to Linus Torvalds (who actually personally participated in some layoffs in Transmeta). His participation in Linux IPO craze and the process of conversion of poor Finnish researcher into newly minted millionaire presents an interesting illustration of why "Ye cannot serve God and mammon".
To reach the goals stated above we will try to reconstruct actual sequence of events that have major influence on the development of Linux. Some of them are well known, other are not. The role of Microsoft, MINIX community, commercial firms like, DEC, Linux distributors, Transmeta and several large corporations (especially DEC and later IBM and Intel) in the development of Linux is also outlined. I tried to verify information that is included in this chapter, but of souce it is far from perfect. If you find mistakes in the facts presented please let me know.
I will also try to address several popular fairy tails. First of all the fairy tail that Linux became prominent OS because of technical merits. My impression is that like in case of Microsoft OSes technical merits played secondary role and Linux was essentially a stepchild of AT&T lawsuit that was filed in early 1992 as well as withdrawal of Microsoft from Unix development (before Linux, Xenix was the most PC -friendly Unix). Otherwise FreeBSD could have been dominating the free software world. While BSD sources were "under house arrest" (a settlement was finally reached only in January 1994) Linux filled the vacuum. Many people wanted to use a free Unix clone on PCs and, since BSD was in trouble, they tried Linux. From the beginning it was weak but very PC friendly Unix-compatible OS; in early versions it actually wasn't real Unix, but it was already more-or-less POSIX compatible and has an attractive GPL licensing (and in early 90th GPL was considered much more favorably than ten years later, see BSD vs GPL for additional details). Moreover it was small and can be installed on 386sx with just 2M of memory: a dominant configuration for home PCs at this time.
Another very popular fairytale is that Linus Torvalds was a volunteer -- this might be true only for the first two years of development. The development of Linux kernel quickly switched to the model of "sponsored software" development. The first sponsor was University of Helsinki which gave Linus semi-official possibility to develop kernel in working hours. Later he got non-disclosed Transmeta salary and stock options (association with Linus was a bad move for Transmeta that probably prevented potentially fruitful partnership with VMware but it did ensured a successful IPO) Crazy Linux IPO gold rush remunerated him quite nicely, probably on the level very few leading commercial Unix developers enjoy: in just three years after arriving in California Linus Torvalds became a multimillionaire. I would say that since 1999 Linus Torvalds was probably the most highly paid developer in the Unix word. So much for a volunteer fairy tail. This chapter also offers support for the hypothesis that Linux startups never operated in true market. It's some kind of articisial market as articifical as the existance of Red Hat after 2000. For those that eventually manage to get to IPO (Red Hat, VA Linux, Caldera) from the beginning it was as close to the typical "Internet bubble" financial scam as one can get. Those startuos which survived the burst of Internet buble the real reason was big guys interests due to shich tthey were provided with a shelter and pocket money during the most difficult times.
Yet another fairytale (that actually is a part of "Raymondism") is that Linus invented new software development model: a democratic (bazaar) distributed development. Actually Linus operated and operates like a dictator and rules the development of the kernel with an iron fist, especially since version 2.0. What was really new is that along with technical talent Linus Torvalds proved to be a brilliant PR person that played a significant role in Linux gold rush and in the controversial success of the Transmeta IPO. I would argue that the real role of Linus Torvalds in Transmeta (up to the IPO) had a significant (or may be even primary) marketing load.
Another popular myth is the Linus was invented Linux -- actually at the beginning Linux was a pretty straightforward reengineering project. Even now, in no way Linux can be considered a technical achievement in a way the original Unix was. Yes it was and is an important social achievement, but technically speaking Linux is pretty boring, conservative reimplementation of Unix. During the first ten years of development covered in this chapter Linux definitely failed to surpass in quality FreeBSD that used for development a tiny fraction of resources in comparison with Linux. Some subsystems remained inferior up to 2002 (the end of the period covered in the chapter). It's also important to understand that Linux, while an exciting example of collaborative Internet-based development of a Unix clone, doesn't really have a design. It's a software development project based on a 'reference model'.
I would argue that with all its great democratic social value, technically Linux looks more like neo-conservative revolution similar to Newt Gingrich "Contract with America" thing (fight corruption, waste in government spending, tax reform and a balanced budget, etc.), but directed against Microsoft. It's difficult to see Linus as a technological advance. True innovators explore ideas that will render something obsolete – as automobiles made livery stables obsolete. I think that scripting languages are the real and significant innovation that can be attributed to open source movement. At the same time classic monolithic kernel that Linux is based upon are CS orthodoxy and are much less innovative than, say, Plan 9 or Be OS, or even Amiga. The most innovative things in Unix-style OSes in the last 10 years were domain of commercial developers (Sun's RPC, NFS, PAM, Trusted Solaris, on the fly updates, etc. AIX Volume manager, to name a few) as well as research institutions (Kerberos, Amoeba, Plan 9, etc. ).
This orthodoxy -- the fundamental resistance to anything non-traditional makes Linux success really a neo-conservative type of success. You can consider Linux to be a new super BIOS for PC and that in this role as everybody understands the conservatism is of paramount importance. Although it serves as an democratic alternative to Microsoft, Linux in its own turn inhibits grows of alternative OSes, contributing to the lack of diversity, and ultimately lack of innovation that are so characteristic for present stage of software engineering. For example OS/2 has a very neat idea of using the same scripting language both as a shell and as a macrolanguage as well as the idea of user-defined (extended) attributes in the filesystems. Both Amiga and BeOS contained innovative features (for example Amiga introduced REXX as an OS shell), Nothing similar can be said about Linux. Neither Linux kernel not any distribution were able to introduce any innovations worth mentioning. All Linus Torvalds was conserned was the speed of running on Intel hardware and as Knuth aptly observed "premature optimization is the root of all evil." From this point of view the success of Linux is a manifestation of a deep crisis in system engineering as Bob Pike noted in his famous paper. It's a definite sign that computer science is coming into its middle age and is experiencing "middle age crisis". Or may be it is turning into a commodity like cars, phones and TV before.
Paradoxically all this makes Linux and Microsoft OSes really close relatives. Linux actually had become a Microsoft of Unix world. Not unlike humans war, the Linux-Microsoft fight has resulted mostly in collateral damage to commercial Unixes despite the fact that there are more technically interesting commercial Unix and Unix-like alternatives to Windows than Linux including Mac OS X. Instead of wiping out Windows, Linux helped Microsoft to drive commercial Unixes out of the entry level server business.
Contrary to some popular press claims Linux wasn't the first open source OS, nor is it the only one that's caught the Internet wave. Many enthusiastically biased papers and books about Linux kernel claim that Linux has a high standard for source code quality. In what version and compared to what? Even in v. 2.4 (a rework of the kernel stimulated by Mindcraft fiasco) several subsystems are still pretty raw and ugly. In reality the first ten years it was weaker that other contenders, for example then any member of BSD family. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD definitely had higher quality of code( and due to that, until recently, played more central role on the Internet), even though the general public has less awareness of them. For example few people know that Yahoo has been relying on FreeBSD since 1995, and according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo they might never succeed if they use the other OS. They would definitely fail with Linux.
Despite Linus claims to the contrary, Linux was more the success of a political movement (anti-Microsoft coalition) and because of commercial distributors marketing than it was a technical success. In this sense Linux is a continuation of the democratic processes that was started by Microsoft and IBM in PC. Actually in more then one aspect Linux success is very similar to the success of Microsoft software: Microsoft success was also partially based on very strong anti-IBM feelings, and like Linux Ms-DOS and Windows were the result of democratization of the software and hardware development that was achieved by personal computer revolution. Like Microsoft helped people to escape from the tyranny of "Sysadmin controlled environment" that existed both on mainframes and large Unix servers (actually in late 80th Microsoft owned the first Unix and extremely influential PC-based version of it called XENIX), Linux, in its turn, helps in diminishing or in some cases even elimination of the "Microsoft operating system tax", especially Microsoft server tax. Like Microsoft OSese the main advantage of Linux was and is that it is the most PC-friendly Unix. In this sense Linux is a successor of Microsoft Xenix. This PC-friendliness along with tremendous increase in power and sophistication of PC hardware platform was important driving force behind Linux success.
Linux in the mainstream is very new and may still need to find it's best place. The Linux hype more or less says Linux would be the system to crush all other system. I used both Linux and Windows for a large part of the last decade and still I believe that Microsoft is attractive on the desktop. The battle of servers is a different story, but on the desktop Linux vs. Windows reminds me a little bit old Microsoft's Internet Explorer vs. Netscape story. Microsoft was revitalized by Linux competition and was able to deliver significant improvement of their OSes. With Windows 2000 and XP on one hand and OS X on the other chances of Linux on desktop are very problematic. Windows prices are now less than they were before (actually upgrades of Microsoft desktop OSes are very reasonably priced in the USA; not so in the developing countries) and even Windows source code recently became much more accessible for corporate customers and Universities: a thing unthinkable five years before. To a certain extent Linux prevented Microsoft stagnation in the operating systems market. Linux hasn't done anything to make PCs more attractive, more powerful, or easier to use. To the extent that there is innovation there, it has come from other companies. All of Linux's contributions have been in providing other companies' technical innovations to a wider audience at lower cost. It's a big win-win situation for consumers and I think that one of the main achievement of Linux as a social movement is a positive influence on Microsoft operating systems and software.
One of the fundamental problem of movements like open source movement is the problem of altruism. As you will see in the chapter approximately while Linux was started as an altruistic volunteer project in 1999 (after Red Hat IPO) Linux seized to be a volunteer developed OS and became some weird mixture of "brain drain" (mainly from Europe) and outsourcing (to Asia). It can be even claimed that there is a substantial component of the movement that views open source development as a "loss leader" young programmers face in order to establish a reputation necessary to get a highly played job (often in the USA). While definitely not encompassing, this kind of motivation can help to explains demographics of open source development (with Europe and LA as dominant regions), and, in particular, why the phenomenon seems prevalent among young college-educated men including Linus Torvalds (who moved to the USA with the explicit goal to become rich). As David Lancashire aptly noted the appropriate analogy for open source development might be not "cooking-pots" or "cauldrons", but Mayflower. This "Mayflower" component of open source can be played in many different ways, for example:
For achieving the goal of "real" (horizontal) immigration to other country (as in case of Torvalds, Miguel De Icaza, Guido van Rossum, etc)
For "virtual immigration" (immigration up) as in case of using open source credentials as the key for opening doors to highly paid (usually by USA firms) corporate/consultant position (Jeremy Allison, Alan Cox, Theodore Tso),
As a way to become a founder of high-tech startup (Marc Ewing, Marc Andreesen, John Ousterhout, Michael Tiemann, Tatu Ylönen)
As a way to sell your reputation for the position of Evangelist (Bruce Perens) or the member of the board seat (Eric Raymond) in some company or well-funded startup.
At the same time commercial open source (Red Hat model) represented an interesting outsourcing strategy with volunteers as zero cost workers (or low cost workers, if they are converted to salaried employers in Europe or third-world countries): they produce code, we sell it. And instead of Stallman's private charity it is companies like Red Hat, IBM, HP, VA Software, etc which are benefiting from this outsourcing.
Fortunately that did not place Linus at the center of the firestorm that has erupted in the United States over the globalization of white-collar jobs. But it's not unlike Linus might succeed were Stallman failed and managed to produce an offspring of two dangerous demons (high speed Internet and GPLed Linux distribution) to impoverish God-blessed American programmers including many who like him previously moved to the USA from other countries. That might help the USA educational system, but unfortunately, the only time displaced programmers think of becoming teachers is when after they got the pink slips, there is no MacDonalds or gas station nearby ;-).
Linux is now a trademark of Linus Torvalds
in the US and some other countries.
Free development | Commercial development | |
| 1970 | DEC begins shipping PDP-11 and revolutionizes the computer industry by selling 250,000 systems. Bell Labs gets a PDP-11 to do text processing for the legal department. System is developed and implemented in UNIX. The standard DEC OS is never installed. | |
| 1971 | First edition of Unix was released | |
| 1972 | The second edition was released. Number of installations grow to 10 | |
| 1973 | Third edition was released with C compiler. Pipe mechanism was introduced. The number of installations grow to 16 The forth edition: the first edition of Unix with kernel largely written in C
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| 1974 | The fifth edition. Following Richie and Thompson's ACM paper, the Unix Timesharing System (1974), fifth edition was made freely available to universities for educational purposes | |
| 1975 | Sixth edition: the first edition that was available outside Bell Labs. Most on the Os was written in C. This version was installed by Thomson at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to its portability and flexibility, UNIX Version 6 (V6) became the minicomputer OS of choice for universities in 1975. | |
| 1976-1977. |
| In 1977, Digital announced VAX-11/780 and VMS 1.0, making the first product shipments in 1978. |
| 1978 | Professor Donald E. Knuth from Stanford University begins to work on TeX, a typesetting system distributed as free software. | |
| 1979 |
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| 1980 |
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| 1981 | 4.1 BSD was released | On August 12 the IBM Model 5150 Personal Computer was released |
| 1983 |
| Microsoft Xenix released and soon became the most popular PC Unix
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| 1984 | The Unix support group (USG) became the Unix System Development Laboratory (USDL) and subsequently released System V Release 2 (SVR2) that included paging, copy on write semantic, shared memory and file locking. | |
| 1985 | MIT based X Consortium distributes the X Window System as free software covered by BSD-style licence. | The first split of the UNIX family tree:
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| 1985 | Microsoft released a really impressive PC-based version of Unix: XENIX 3 or XENIX 286 and became dominant Unix vendor on PC. Xenix 3.0 was capable of dual booting from a partition with MS DOS on the other partition. It included new features from 4.1BSD and from AT&T's System III and instantly became a huge hit among Unix enthusiasts: it required just 512M of memory and 10M harddrive and can run on $5000 machine: the cheapest Unix workstation of this time. | |
| 1986 |
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| 1987 |
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| 1988. | The NeXTSTEP operating system was released for very elegant black NeXT computers (cubes). It used the Mach microkernel, and added elements of 4.3BSD. It incorporated an advanced GUI, arguably the most advanced available at the time. NeXT's engineers even created a new programming language — Objective C — to take advantage of the new GUI. Display interpreted Postscript and for this time was simply amazing. In August 1988, Bill Gates hired Dave Cutler, the atrchitect of VMS. One of Cutler's conditions for moving to Microsoft was that he could bring around 20 former Digital employees with him, including several Prism hardware engineers. Microsoft readily met this demandthe company knew hiring an OS architect of Cutler's stature was a coup, and few engineers had Cutler's track record. In addition, Gates felt that Microsoft's long-term future depended on the development of a new OS that would rival UNIX. | |
| 1988 |
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| 1989 | Cygnus, the first commercial company devoted to provide commercial support for GNU software and open source software in general, is founded. |
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| 1988 | Admitted to the University. The same year Minix emerged. |
| 1990 | Takes his first C programming class and Unix class |
| 1991 | in January bought his first PC (386sx-based) |
| Date | Linux | Other Unixes |
| Jan, 1991 | Linus bought a 386sx based PC, may be after reading the first Jolitz paper | The first paper by William and Lynne Jolitz on how to port BSD Unix to i386-based PCs was published in Dr. Dobbs PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A PRACTICAL APPROACH In this first installment of a multipart series, Bill and Lynne define the design specification for 386BSD -- Berkeley UNIX for the 80386. |
| Feb, 1991 | Played enough Prince of Persia :-) | The second paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386:THREE INITIAL PC UTILITIES Utilities to let you execute GCC-compiled programs in protected mode from MS-DOS, and copy files to a shared portion of disk so MS-DOS and Unix can exchange information. |
| Mar, 1991 | Learned some assembly language programming and wrote terminal emulators. , ..he spent a long time just reading netnews. Sorry, I mean of course that he was debugging his terminal emulation code by reading netnews. The emulator consisted of two processes, one reading the keyboard and writing to the serial port, the other reading the serial port and writing to the screen and emulating a terminal. | The third paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE STANDALONE SYSTEM Using their protected mode program loader, Bill and Lynne create a minimal 80386 protected mode standalone C programming environment for operating systems kernel development. |
| Apr, 1991 | Installed Minix, Linux kernel programming started. | The forth paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: LANGUAGE TOOLS CROSS SUPPORT Bill and Lynne describe "cross" mode operations as they work towards bootstrapping 386BSD. |
| May, 1991 | The fifth paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386:THE INITIAL ROOT FILESYSTEM
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| June, 1991 | The six paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386:RESEARCH & THE COMMERCIAL SECTOR
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| July, 1991 | The Seventh paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A STRIPPED-DOWN KERNEL | |
| Aug 25, 1991 | The first Linux release announcement. Linus Torvalds posted an article in comp.os.minix saying his new experimental kernel was running bash and gcc, and he was going to post the source code soon. | The 8-th paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL |
| Sept, 1991. | Using Marice J Bach book Design of the Unix Operating System and Minix released the first (0.01) version of Linux kernel (at the age of 22). 0.01 was just source code, no binaries. The kernel itself was pretty primitive and barely worked. Primitivism made is very attractive to the enthusiasts | The 9-th paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386:THE BASIC KERNEL Multiprogramming is the focus of this month's installment. |
| Oct, 1991 | On October 5 famous "Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT" letter announced the first "official" version of Linux, which was version 0.02. At that point, Linux was able to run bash (the GNU Bourne Again Shell) and gcc (the GNU C compiler), but not much else. Ari Lemmke, the administrator at ftp.funet.fi who first made Linux available for FTP coined the name Linux | The 10-th paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL Bill and Lynne continue their exploration of multiprogramming and multitasking. |
| Nov, 1991 | The 11-th paper by William and Lynne Jolitz PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL It's necessary to understand UNIX device interfaces before integrating device drivers. Bill and Lynne examine BSD kernel/device driver interfaces and how BSD works the miracle of autoconfiguration. | |
| Jan, 1992 | More stable version 0.12 released. License was changed to GPL. Due to increased stability this version was soon renamed to 0.9 | Unixware was released as a result of a joint venture between Novell and USL, called Univel. High quality commercial Unix for Intel 386 platform is back. |
| Mar, 1992. | Linux v.95 was released. First more or less stable and usable Linux version | The US Air Force awards New York University (NYU) a contract to build an open source compiler for what is now called Ada 95. The NYU team chooses GNU GCC for code generation and calls their compiler GNAT (GNU NYU Ada 95 Translator). |
| Apr, 1992 | The first Linux newsgroup, comp.os.linux, is proposed and started by Ari Lemmke. | April 20, 1992 The start of infamous Novell vs U.C. Berkeley lawsuit and Linux development |
| Jun, 1992 | Commercial distributors were blessed by Linus | 386BSD 0.1 was released. A CD-ROM version of 386BSD has been announced in Dr. Dobb's Journal. The source is ~180Meg |
| Nov, 1992 | "Linux commercialization wave" started. The first commercial distribution, called Yggdrasil was created by Adam Richter:
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Sun introduces Solaris, which is based on System V, release 4. SunOS, which is based on BSDF UNIX, will be phased out.
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| March 1993 | Linus writes a email about "taking advantage of the GPL to make a quick buck" stating "So please, don't bitch about commercial uses just because they are commercial: find something better to complain about." | |
| June, 1993 | On June 16 Novell acquires USL and both Univel and USL were folded into Novell Unix System group. | |
| July, 1993 | Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding, becomes the second commercial standalone distribution and quickly becomes popular within the Linux community. Is was also available from free ftp server. It used .99 kernel and Net-2 BSD package for networking. See Announcement | |
| Aug, 1993 | Ian Murdock creates a new Linux-based distribution called Debian GNU/Linux, developed by a group of volunteers distributed around the world. | |
| Dec, 1993 | Version 0.99pl15 aka v.1.0 was released via Internet. WEB revolution reached critical mass with Linux as one of the major beneficiaries. Very weak networking support limited Linux role to a developer workstation. |
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| Feb 1994 |
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| March 1994 | Commercialization created a flow of money and talent into the project. Linux became one of the most often sold CD by CD distributors. At least five CD Rom distributors already exist selling ~50,000 CD ROMs a month. Several talented developers were attracted by the scent of money into the Linux distribution business. | |
| May 1994 |
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| Jun, 1994 | The first issue of Linux Journal is published. Robert Yong is a founder | |
| Jul, 1996 | Professionals from DEC come to the rescue of Linux from FreeBSD attack; Digital invested money into two porting projects to bring Linux to DEC Alpha. Quality of the kernel improved, a pretty decent Ext2 filesystem was added. Networking started to look acceptable. Linus got important insights and training due to the process of porting, ability to work with professionals from DEC and the quality of the Alpha architecture. He also got a personal Alpha workstation | |
| Oct, 1994 | Caldera was founded by Bryan Sparks as a start-up venture funded by Ray Noorda, former CEO of Novell. | NetBSD 1.0 released. |
| Nov, 1994 | Red Hat 1.0 was released by Marc Ewing, a former Carnegie Mellon student who had become a star Linux developer. See Free Online Encyclopedia for additional details | |
| Dec, 1994. | FreeBSD 2.0 was released, the first distribution based on 4.4BSD-Lite release without infringing NET/2 file. See Announcement:
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| Jun 1995 | Red Hat, founded by a former Carnegie Mellon student and a star Linux developer. Marc Ewing, merged (more correctly was bought by) with ACC Corporation, run by Bob Young. Robert Yong of ACC (former founder of Linux Journal) became a CEO. A dominant Linux distributor (Microsoft of Linux) was formed. Robert Young start working to attract VC with the eye on the future IPO. | The final set of changes to 4.4BSD-Lite, was released as 4.4BSD-Lite, Release 2. The CSRG was disbanded and development of BSD became a volunteer operation supported by BSDI |
| Sept, 1995 | Red Hat Commercial Linux 2.0 was released, the first RPM package manager based distribution. Red Hat edged out Slackware as the leading distribution (in less then two years) |
| 1996 | Linus' first daughter was born. Minor disruptions of kernel development. It's the first time many developers have openly complained of the Linus source control system (ie, submit patches into the black hole named Linus). | The Open Group forms as a merger of OSF and X/Open. |
| Feb, 1996 | Linux fanatics as a group with "Amiga syndrome" were first described in mainstream press. Slashdotters were still non-existent at this time ;-) | |
| Jun 1996 | Caldera acquired DR DOS and filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft seeking treble damages, as well an injunction to halt "illegal conduct by Microsoft calculated and intended to prevent and destroy competition in the computer software industry." Everybody in Linux community applauded the move. Their behavior will change later with SCO lawsuit... | |
| Aug, 1996. | FreeBSD 2.1.5 released with significantly improved stability and feature set. Support burning of CDROMs and some of the best reasonably-priced hardware available, like Adaptec AIC7850, Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B PCI ethernet card. Able to run Linux version of Netscape. FreeBSD 2.1.5 represents the culmination of over a year's worth of work on the 2.1-STABLE branch of FreeBSD since it began with FreeBSD 2.0.5. In the 7 months since 2.1 was released, many bug fixes, updates and careful enhancements have been made, the results of which you now see here. | |
| Nov 1996 | Caldera Releases Caldera OpenLinux (COL) Base 1.0. It contains a lot of commercial software including MetroX (A commercial X11 server) and was the first distribution that has reasonably stable and robust X implementation. For some time Red Hat was kicked off the enterprise arena by Caldera and it became the No.1 enterprise-oriented Linux distribution (probably until 1998 or Caldera 1.2) | |
| December 1996. | Linux 2.0 was released |
Summary: Microsoft was partially paralyzed by the battle with the Department of Justice and cannot retaliate against defectors from the Windows NT camp. Halloween memo was leaked to the Web. Intel invested in Red Hat. Number of staff developers in Red Hat was grown to over twenty. Major database vendors ported product to Linux. Corel ported Word Perfect. Shipments of Linus servers surged by 212%, a growth rate that outpaced all others in the server market. Linus became a media darling, and enjoyed his minutes of fame. Gave more interviews in one year that for the rest of his life;
Eric Raymond attacks FSF and launched an open source marketing campaign. Raymodism became a more moderate, reform branch of open source religion and splits from Stallmanism. Salon Magazine interviews Eric Raymond after Netscape's announcement to open their source code. Some interesting quotes:
The UNIX system reaches its 30th anniversary. The Open Group and the IEEE commence joint development of a revision to POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. First LinuxWorld conference. Mac OS X Server Released at about the same time as Darwin, Mac OS X Server was a sort of preview version of Mac OS X designed specifically for file servers. Tru64 UNIX ships.
January 1999. Version 2.2 of the kernel released despite bugs -- Linus probably needed to respond to the announcement of the FreeBSD 3.0 ;-)
February 1999.
"The greatest opportunity for an open-source software business model may come from even less direct plays -- companies that specialize in essential accessories like manuals stand to gain substantial profits from the demand for open-source software materials. O'Reilly & Associates, the leading publisher of technical resource books, has sold more than $94 million in open-source-related materials since it was founded, most of that since 1997."
March 1999.
August 1999.
October 1999
November 1999
December 1999
January 2000
February 2000
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