“How did you first learn about Linux? What were you doing in
your own life at the time? (age, student, occupation, etc.)”
“Corey Minyard: It’s hard to remember exactly where I learned
about Linux. It had to be on Usenet someplace. I downloaded 0.11. I
was working as a hardware/software designer at the time and we had
just obtained Internet access recently. The timing was right.”
“What attracted you to it, compared to FreeBSD, proprietary UNIX
systems, or lucrative areas such as Windows? What made you want to
help with development?”
“Corey: It had to be Linus’ attitude. He had the right
attitude to make it succeed. I knew it would be big from the
beginning. I helped because when things don’t work right, well, it
annoys me. Plus, everything else cost too much or was lousy.
Except for FreeBSD, which I didn’t know existed. I’m not sure it
even did exist at that point in time.” “What part of Linux were you
personally interested in and working on? Are you still involved
with Linux development? If so, how?”
“Corey: I sent various small patches in at the beginning. I
wrote the CDU31A proprietary CDROM driver (which, amazingly, some
people still use, even though the driver doesn’t work very well any
more due to kernel changes and my inability to support it). I did a
lot of work in the 0.98/0.99 days on the TCP stacks finding race
conditions and submitting patches. I am currently doing some work
on the PowerPC code; I did a major restructure to make adding new
platforms easier and I did a port to the Force Powercore board. I’m
doing lots of little things for work.”