Happy birthday 🎊🎉 GNU/Linux.
Today GNU/Linux is 32 years old.
It was thankfully released to the public on August 25th, 1991 by Linus Torvalds when he was only 21 years old student.
What a lovely journey 🤍
Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds's involvement; he "only" created and maintains the most popular kernel.
But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.
My brain gets numb when I start thinking about all the branches that have come from Unix... and the branches from those branches and so on.
Are you sure unix will be created in the year 3.843063914 E+5636(1970!)
How would anything even survive 3.843063914 E+5636 years after the end of the universe to make unix
No way Linux is 32! I remember when it first came out and it was just...oh.
Don't mind me, I'll just be here yelling at the cloud.
Sigh, my condolences. I’m shouting right beside you. I first learned about linux in 1993 in college. I got it working on a shiny new 486 with super vga graphics. We were allowed access to the college’s aix mainframes and thus the internet via a slip connection - but only through Unix like systems. Linux was amazing, I couldn’t believe we had x going, and loading up cad, matlab, maple, ftp, fsp, irc, nettrek, and everything else possible in the computer centers - but over a telephone line from our apartment.
Magical.
Funny how it really only became my daily driver three ish years ago - despite using it forever. Cuz games - glad that’s changed finally.
If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.
Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.
What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.
In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.
The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.
While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.
In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).
People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.
The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).
Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.
As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.
If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.
Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.
It's as if it was only yesterday that I watched him flip nvidia off.
Posted via arch.
It’s a shame. Linus was and is far more deserving of respect for his contributions to technology than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Probably even Woz. But he’s by far down the line in terms of fame and fortune. Except maybe Woz.
I have a feeling he's more okay with having less fortune though. Just the impression I get about him.
I can't imagine he's struggling for money, he's a smart guy and wrote an OS used in some capacity by so many corporations
He's probably written books that sell quite well
"He oversees and has final say over every line of code [of Linux] to this day. The Linux Foundation pays Linus around $1.5 million per year to support the software."
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-torvalds-net-worth/
He has an estimated net worth of $150 million.
https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linus-torvalds-net-worth
They meant gain wealth like apple founders or any other big tech. Believe he derives a salary from Linux foundation for his work. I don't imagine that being anything comparable to owning large percentage of a tech company.
True but he's also going to make more than enough to live comfortably I'm sure
Don't need to be a billionaire to have a good comfortable life
Didn't mean he wasnt earning well. Just clarified what the original comment meant.
Quoting from memory: "Remember the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"
I love GNU/Linux.
Before I used Debian, I'd constantly fight with my operating system. Every time I opened michaelsoft binbows(which would take ages to open), I'd make sure that simplewall is running, so that bill doesn't get any more info, after every 180 days, I'd run MAS to renew my office 365. I'd manually sync time since windows would use that same domain to send telemetry.
Now everytime I turn on my computer, the swirl of Debian greets me in a flash, my i3 being ready even before I sit.
I can spend hours doing work without any mandatory updates . It is an operating system that never makes me feel its presence. For that I'm grateful to people like Ian, Stallman, Linus, among countless others making my life better.
This is an interesting piece of history that I have never seen. Thanks for sharing
Seems like only yesterday I was co-admining my first public server in 1996.
Fun times.
That makes Linux a Leo. Someone who cares about that tell me what that means
Means it has positive polarity, fixed modality, and fire triplicity. Don't you know nothing?
Read as Law Enforcement Officer. And I was, huh? Then it hit me. Ah, the zodiac...
I read in "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" that Linux was not that revolutionary (it reused code and ideas from Mimix) but the collaboration of the entire talent pool from the Internet to develop the kernel is. Massively respect for Linus.
