Wired: Linux, a Decade of Open Source

"The only way I know how to describe it is that all the stars in the heavens lined up," said Bob Young, the chairman of Red Hat, one of the first companies to start a business around Linux.

"You get a kid in Finland who arrives at university saying I need a better OS for the PC that I've been hacking in. He happens to be a really good software architect and a nice guy, a good project leader. So things just took off."

Oh yeah, and the Internet was also becoming big at the time, which played a part, too, in Linux's rise. Young said the fact that Torvalds and others working on Linux knew how to work remotely, and that they figured out how to code software without ever having "hung out and had a beer," was essential to the new OS's development."

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