![]() ![]() I explore these questions and more in the book, which was published this month by MIT Press. Why did Linux programmers succeed in producing a feature-rich kernel so quickly, while so many other free software projects in the early 1990s struggled to get a working kernel up and running? Why did Linus Torvalds, the student who created Linux, decide to give his code away for free? Why did Linux beat out much bigger and better-funded kernels, like GNUs and BSDs, to become probably the most important open source software project in history? You have to look at some big questions about Linux’s past, such as: Sure, you can explain Linux’s popularity today in terms of factors that exist in the present - its technical features, the dynamism of the open source community, the corporate backing that Linux enjoys today, and so on.īut, to understand what really launched Linux into the position it enjoys today, however, you need to know the history of Linux - as well as the history of the larger free and open source software universe. Why? That’s a question I try to answer in my new book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution. ![]() Today, hundreds of millions of people are using Linux. Twenty-six years ago this month, a geeky student in Finland released the Linux kernel to the world. ![]()
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