[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Linus Torvalds announced the arrival of the Linux
kernel in 1991 to comp.os.minix with the news that “I’m doing a
(free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like GNU) for 386(486) AT clones.”“Though GNU/Linux is now ubiquitous within the enterprise it is
easy to forget that much of the innovation and inspiration behind
free software still comes from communities of individuals for whom
GNU/Linux is “just a hobby”. The contributions of these communities
are as important to the popularisation and development of GNU/Linux
as the developers employed by IBM or Red Hat.“The best ideas are just as likely to spring from the users and
developers of Debian, Gentoo, Arch or PCLinuxOS, who are
contributing for fun, to ‘scratch an itch’, or just because they
can – as they are from the better known and better publicised
distributions and sponsors.“The informality of the free software model, and its ability to
allow participants to find their own level, encourages innovation
and the spread of ideas. Community led distributions are just as
important to the success of GNU/Linux as Ubuntu or SUSE or Red
Hat.”