[ Thanks to Roope Anttinen for this
link. ]
“In the middle of the night, a scruffy 21-year-old sat in a
darkened room at his mother’s house in Helsinki, Finland, tapping
out a message on his computer keyboard. “Hello everybody out
there,” he typed, sipping tea and nibbling the dry pasta he
habitually ate. “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby,
won’t be big and professional)…I’d like any feedback on things
people like/dislike…”
“The young man’s name was Linus Torvalds. And what he sent
out to the world on that August night in 1991 has transformed the
whole landscape of computer use. Torvalds had done something
remarkable: he had created the kernel of a new computer operating
system–the brains of a computer which controls the hardware and
organizes the programs. Not only that, he had then given it away
free, a decision akin to the Coca-Cola company publishing the
formula for Coke, or MI5 releasing its top-secret files. Virtually
anyone with access to the Internet–from Bristol to Berlin to
Boston–could simply download the key codes that Torvalds had
written and then apply their own skill to perfecting the system to
fit their own needs.”
“Linux–the only successful computer operating system yet
created outside the US–has become an international
phenomenon. Top officials at Bill Gates’s Microsoft
Corporation worry that it is becoming a direct threat to their
company’s dominant position in the software market. Torvalds
himself is lionized by computer aficionados around the world. To
them, he is instantly identifiable, like Madonna or Elvis, by just
a single name: Linus.”