Corporate Investment the price of Linux's freedom

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"Cox recalls that the way of things in those days was that "if you wrote something neat you posted it to Usenet", and people downloaded it and did as they liked with it.

"Cox had written a multiuser game and "wanted a better platform than my Amiga for that." He considered 386 BSD which needed floating point. "I hadn't got the floating point chip, which was 70 quid at the time, so I installed Linux." He ported his multi-user game to Linux, but there were still things it couldn't do, "so I fixed those and discovered that someone else had already fixed them before me."

"He installed Linux on the Swansea Computer Society machine, and "started trying to make the networking code work properly, because it was buggy at the time." The university had a "nice very noisy multi-protocol network which was just perfect for crashing your computer. I started fixing these things, which is how I ended up doing the networking code, building on the base networking code that other people had done... Some things weren't really fixed until somebody became involved who really understood how the maths behind these things worked.""

Complete Story

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