LinuxPlanet: Debian: A Brief Retrospective

“When I posted this message a decade ago, Linux was in use by
maybe a few tens of thousands of people around the world, and most
of those people were either running their own homebrew Linux system
or Peter MacDonald’s SLS, the Softlanding Linux System. Red Hat
Software was but a twinkle in Marc Ewing’s eye.

“I had been using Linux for several months, since January of
1993. Not long after, I was hooked. Like most other early Linux
enthusiasts, what hooked me was not Linux itself, but rather the
community that had formed around it.

“It’s difficult to remember, because open source and open
development projects are commonplace now, but in 1993, what I saw
happening seemed completely illogical. How could people without any
master plan, from different parts of the world, speaking different
languages and not getting paid, come together to build something as
complex as an operating system? The fascinating thing was that it
worked…”

Complete
Story