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Exactly. It makes me cringe. A majority of the firms looking to hire in the "Who's Hiring" thread have inflated self-worth.
As a developer the company can have whatever view of itself it cares to have as long as my paycheck clears.
Although I’ve read this probably a dozen times. What I think about this today, as I’m about to reviel my next project is that it’s so crazy how things evolved for open source. Nowadays people compete with companies and having an announcment like this usually includes : - website explaining as a pitch what is better about your software - ready to use examples and templates to support your claim - branding with a logo…
I think that is a little simplistic, the main thing that got Linux going was sustained and continued effort. If this first message had been a flop Linus would likely have continued working and pushing it through. It was almost a decade before Linux could be considered a "real" operating system ready for production.
It was already in wide spread use amongst the small dial-up ISPs by 1995.
"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" That's kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now a détente.
I'd say most Linux installations today are Android mobiles. Do those have Minix too?
It's also likely that Google will replace Linux on Android with Fuschia, yet another microkernel OS, derived from LK.
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Hmm, one of BSDs. In 1991 there were already five or so. Plus other 'cheap' Unixes like Xenix and the usual big names. If Linux didn't happen we'd have a few thousand BSD variants by now. The great thing about Linus was the combination of technical brilliance and his forceful personality.
They were still in copyright battle with AT&T until 1994 and by that time it was too late, Linux was on its way.
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Exactly. It makes me cringe. A majority of the firms looking to hire in the "Who's Hiring" thread have inflated self-worth.
As a developer the company can have whatever view of itself it cares to have as long as my paycheck clears.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that is a little simplistic, the main thing that got Linux going was sustained and continued effort. If this first message had been a flop Linus would likely have continued working and pushing it through. It was almost a decade before Linux could be considered a "real" operating system ready for production.
Less than a decade by far. It was already in wide spread use amongst the small dial-up ISPs by 1995.
people give Jobs and Gates a lot of credit because they focused on commercial products that were marketed to the public -- Linus, for me, is probably the single most important person to technology (software) in the last 35 years. With Linux and Git alone, it as impactful and game changing in this industry that I can think of. I cannot think of any person that's been this important to my career and my income.
Somewhere in a cavern full of sandals, a Stallmanu is quietly weeping.
I was around at the time that Linux was born. I remember the HURD. I had done some work on Mach while I was in university and I was hugely interested in working on the HURD. I sent email to MIB and essentially received a reply "We don't need you kid". But this is the way it was at the time. People working on GNU were used to doing things in a Cathedral fashion (to put it in ESR's terms). They had small teams where only a few trusted people had input. The rest were users, not collaborators.
The internet was not common at that point and we didn't have things like distributed source repositories. Development was usually done using CVS and you had to be a core contributor to have access. You got access to source code from releases only. And while some projects had fairly regular releases, some did not. For the HURD, I think the idea was that there was no point to having regular releases because it wasn't even self hosting yet.
Linus showed up and changed the world. He said, "Here's this thing I've been working on" and he didn't care who you were. If you sent him a patch, he looked at it. This was completely different from how things used to work for most projects. Linus didn't make you sign over your copyright. He didn't vet you as a core or non-core developer. He just took your patch and evaluated it on its technical merits.
The whole Bazaar approach that is common today, stems from how Linus ran kernel development right from the start. It changed everything in free software development because it was just 100x better. No friction. Welcoming. Not discriminatory.
But if you think RMS is sad about this state of affairs, I think you are terribly mistaken. The HURD was a failure because the world changed under them. Linus came around and showed everybody how software freedom is supposed to work in practice. This took a powerful but small group and expanded its reach to the everyday programmer. RMS's dream of a world where normal developers valued free software over proprietary software came about because of this shift -- and he's smart enough to realise it.
RMS was clumsy about the whole GNU/Linux thing, but Linux only existed because GNU existed. Back in the day, the first thing I would do when I got a new Unix box was to install GNU -- because it was massively better than whatever crap came with the Unix system. Even now, despite the advances of BSD systems, I would still install GNU on top of a BSD kernel if I was running BSD.
Occasionally I hear people asking the question, "If Android is running Linux, why can't I run my Linux apps on my phone?" It drives me crazy. It's because you've got an Android/Linux box instead of a GNU/Linux box. The bit you want is GNU, not Linux. This is precisely why people like RMS wanted to stress the importance of GNU in the equation. I don't agree with his approach, but it's foolish to deny the basis of the argument.
Without RMS's vision, we would not be where we are today. I lived in the world where I had to use $5k per seat proprietary libraries to get anything done. I lived in the world where large corporations who built compilers told me what I was allowed to build. RMS rescued us from that. ESR gave us a vocabulary with which to talk about this stuff. He categorised the kinds of ways people approached things and allowed us to think critically about what we were doing. Linus showed us how to actually make it work. All of these people have disagreed with specific things the others have said, but they also show massive respect for one another -- for good reason. Without them, our lives as developers would be infinitely worse.
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I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important. It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for other people to actually make useful contributions with…
It probably means you're not the target audience.
More than half of the emails I get from technology companies fail to start with a reminder of what their product or service does. I see this much, much less frequently with consumer products — better marketing.