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Steamymoomilk ,

Ahh man only ata?

theshatterstone54 ,

Yeah, I was looking at it today actually.

Happy Birthday, Linux.

EarthShipTechIntern ,

…probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks,as that’s all I have. :-(.

Cuteness.

As in hilarity.

some_guy ,

And an OS was born.

psycho_driver ,

Happy Birthday!

possiblylinux127 ,

Portable

netvor , (edited )
@netvor@lemmy.world avatar

Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.

33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.

(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)

AccountMaker ,

You might be thinking of this:

youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared

Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.

psycho_driver ,

I would argue that it does dominate the desktop now as well, just not by usage numbers.

If I was told I had to use a windows desktop these days at home I think I’d start investing in a very large book collection.

CaptPretentious ,

You have to use a Windows desktop at home.

Sincerely,

Barnes & Noble

Grandwolf319 ,

I’m OOTL, what’s the backstory here?

thesporkeffect ,

Linux

Grandwolf319 ,

What was minix then? A non FOSS version?

ABasilPlant ,

www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754

MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.

In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.

Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.

Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).

See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

What was minix then? A non FOSS version?

It wasn’t FOSS, but then neither was Linux originally.

IsoKiero ,

That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn’t strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.

Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.

Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn’t, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn’t strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole ‘FOSS’ mentality and rules for it wasn’t really a thing either back then.

There’s of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.

LeFantome ,

Agree with you up until “the competition was not”.

GNU HURD was competition for one thing.

More importantly, so was BSD. BSD predates Linux ( though its distribution specifically as FreeBSD does not ).

IsoKiero ,

I’ve read Linus’s book several years ago, and based on that flimsy knowledge on back of my head, I don’t think Linus was really competing with anyone at the time. Hurd was around, but it’s still coming soon™ to widespread use and things with AT&T and BSD were “a bit” complex at the time.

BSD obviously has brought a ton of stuff on the table which Linux greatly benefited from and their stance on FOSS shouldn’t go without appreciation, but assuming my history knowledge isn’t too badly flawed, BSD and Linux weren’t straight competitors, but they started to gain traction (regardless of a lot longer history with BSD) around the same time and they grew stronger together instead of competing with eachother.

A ton of us owes our current corporate lifes to the people who built the stepping stones before us, and Linus is no different. Obviously I personally owe Linus a ton for enabling my current status at the office, but the whole thing wouldn’t been possible without people coming before him. RMS and GNU movement plays a big part of that, but equally big part is played by a ton of other people.

I’m not an expert by any stretch on history of Linux/Unix, but I’m glad that the people preceding my career did what they did. Covering all the bases on the topic would require a ton more than I can spit out on a platform like this, I’m just happy that we have the FOSS movement at all instead of everything being a walled garden today.

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

I read a biography of Stallman several years ago. The whole free software movement was an attempt to preserve the early hacker culture where everybody freely swapped code. So, Stallman didn’t really “invent” FOSS; he just codified that early hacker ethos.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I’m pretty sure the eventual conversion of every atom in the universe to computronium will run Linux.

thingsiplay ,

(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)

Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.

737 ,

not really, gnu is still a big professional project

Hupf ,
@Hupf@feddit.org avatar

GNU, or as I’d like to call it, GNU+PTerry

mariusafa ,

GNU Hurd didn’t take a good path of development following MACH design. But I still think GNU Hurd is the kernel of the future. Probably the Next generation Hurd. Just because GNU MACH and Hurd present very convoluted designs.

A kernel that performs most of their activities in user space and that it is truly modular looks very promising for the kind of systems we have nowadays and in the future.

Someone has to make the change, or we will stagnate in cumbersome and up featured systems.

Hadriscus ,

Has he come up with a name yet ?

thingsiplay ,

Freax

ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

It’s a minix clone, so… mimix?

neidu2 ,

I actually like that name, but it might be too close to the original for trademark comfort.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

I love it, totally should have gone with that.

“This is Linus Torvalds introducing minix as Linux.”

HairyHarry ,

How about lUnix?

WhiskyTangoFoxtrot ,

Freax.

LodeMike ,

GNU is older than Linux? Neat.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)

pelya ,

I’m pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.

How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I’m pretty sure the answer is zero.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, gotta’ love how all the Apple fanboys were like Bash? Meh’ zsh is the superior shell in the span of a day.

I mean was the GPL viral… yeah probably. But it’s not like the courts came after either of them. Or ever really will in a meaningful way. Although hope springs eternal for non-webkit browsers in the not-EU 😌

mariusafa ,

Clang and the LLVM with BSD like licences so we can get the 80’s suing experience of UNIX yet again.

It’s impressive how many people in the FOSS community hate GNU. Even to the point of creating OSes without GNU in it. Working for free for companies just to get their contributions stolen or expunged.

Apple loves Open Source, they can stole it as they like, like they did with Darwin (a derivation of XNU). Everything is open until we no longer want to, and you don’t have any right to desist such actions. This sounds like a dream for them.

Google loves Open Source, they can build an spyware, ad vending machine, DRM platform that is hosted in almost any IOT machine. This is Android.

The community has to realize that if you care about your software you have to ENFORCE the freedom of it.

The are entire projects just to liberate android from google. That’s is all fault of the open source licence.

There are quite a lot of projects which exist to liberate software projects that have been taken hostage. This is no sense.

Most of the IOT devices are presenting paywall features thanks to Android: cars, fridges, TVs, etc. What is next?

netvor ,
@netvor@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it’s been already well recognized by then.

If I recall correctly from some RMS’ talks I’ve seen many years ago, they’ve been working on it for years before, it’s just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there’s GNU Hurd, but I’m not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)

Affidavit ,

This somehow makes me feel both old and young at the same time.

xilliah ,

Congratulations you’ve just unlocked midlife crisis. You can now wear sunglasses inside and shop at camp david.

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

Ehh, it’ll never take off.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Truly humble beginnings.

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