Kudos to Linus Torvalds, 20 years of Linux.
Linux is exciting, simply beautiful, running super computers, web servers, stock trading platforms, telecommunication systems, cell phones, ATMs, TVs, GPS, at the movies, in the car. Works brilliantly and is fantastic.
Congratulations Linux! The party continues each and every day.
Hooah!
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, started the celebration of Linux’s 20th anniversary at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, but when is Linux’s real birthday? Is it August 25th, when Linus announced the project? October 5th 1991, when 0.02, the first public release was made? I decided to go straight to the source and asked Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds.
SJVN: “What’s Linux real birthday?” You’re the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?
LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.
The first newsgroup post is more public (Aug 25th), and you can find it with headers giving date and time and everything. In contrast, I don’t think the 0.01 release was ever announced in any public setting (only in private to a few people who had shown interest, and I don’t think any of those emails survive). So these days the way to find the 0.01 date (Sept 17th) is to go and look at the dates of the files in the tar-file that still remains.
So both of them work for me. Or either.
And btw, some people will argue for yet other days. For example, the earliest public semi-mention of Linux was July 3rd: that was the first time I asked for some POSIX docs publicly on the minix newsgroup and mentioned I was working on a project (but didn’t name it). And at the other end, October 5th was the first time I actually publicly announced a Linux version: “version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already).”
So you might have to buy four cakes if you want to cover all the eventualities.
SJVN: Did you have any idea that Linux was going to turn out as big as it would? I think I know the answer to that one, so perhaps the better questions are, “When did you realize that Linux was going to be bigger than GNU or Minix [Andrew Tannenbaum's ground-breaking free software Unix-like operating system for students]? Bigger than just something for techies? Bigger than Microsoft!?”
LT: Bigger than Minix was pretty early, some time in the first quarter of 1992 Linux was already doing things Minix didn’t, and was gathering momentum.
The rest happened pretty gradually, and never really hit me as being as exceptional as the early ‘92 realization that there were actually people I didn’t know who were using and tinkering with Linux.
