‘I am doing a free operating system’ – Linux celebrates twenty-five years

A quarter of a century ago, student Linus Torvalds sent a message to a newsgroup, announcing his own operating system. In the following years, Linux has grown into a ubiquitous system; reason to commemorate the 25th anniversary.

At the very beginning, the Finn Torvalds was still a student at the University of Helsinki. Among other things, the arrival of the first 32-bit x86 processor led him to send the now famous message in 1991, out of frustration with the licensing and other limitations of the 16-bit Minix kernel. At first he worked on the project under the name ‘Freax’, a contraction of the word ‘free’ or ‘free’ and the ‘x’ from the Unix name. Yet it eventually became Linux, thanks to a stubborn colleague. The pronunciation of the name should be clear by now, thanks to an illuminating audio clip from Linus himself.

The message from 1991

The first version of the Linux kernel contained a mere ten thousand lines of code. The decision to make this code freely available under the gpl soon created various combinations of the Linux kernel with other open source software. Some combinations, or distributions, came out in the early 1990s with well-known names like Debian, Slackware, and Red Hat. In the past twenty years, the number of distributions has increased enormously. According to Distrowatch’s Page Hit Ranking, the top three in the past year are Mint, Debian and Ubuntu.

The maturing process of Linux, just like in our own lives, was not always smooth sailing. For example, about fifteen years ago, Torvalds was faced with the decision to throw in the towel, because the project was no longer manageable. This did not happen, but even a few years later he was not satisfied with the state of the kernel. He called it bloated at the time, because too many features would have been added. The relationship with Microsoft was also erratic. A struggle that erupted in 2004 intensified in subsequent years and was later settled. It is therefore remarkable that, for example, Bash can now be found in Windows 10 and PowerShell and .net are available for Linux.

Today, the kernel has about 22 million lines of code and a total of 5,000 developers are working on the open source project. Linux has become an integral part of the current ecosystem and forms the basis for, for example, Google’s Android OS. Most of the internet infrastructure also depends on the kernel in various ways. The most recent version is 4.7.2, with Linus contributing less and less to the previous versions. However, he is still involved in developing his brainchild. We hope, of course, that many more versions will follow in the future and that # rm -rf –no-preserve-root / will continue to cause some hilarity. Congratulations, Linux!