(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)
Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.
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.
not really, gnu is still a big professional project
GNU, or as I’d like to call it, GNU+PTerry
GNU is older than Linux? Neat.
Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)
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.
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?
XNU is the kernel in Darwin, XNU is an Apple product derived from BSD and Mach. Darwin has a lot of FreeBSD in it.
Apple shares that code though. It’s on GitHub. There used to be Darwin distributions.
Your Android example doesn’t make very much sense either. The largest Android issues are typically hardware lockdown. Nothing about the GPL prevents someone building an ad platform that spies on you, it just makes them share the source code for it. Google’s licensing choices means they don’t share the source code for the Google pieces they put on top of AOSP, the entire project means people can build the alternatives though.
The lawsuits were about AT&Ts proprietary license. BSD and similar licenses are not that.
BSD licence allowed to work with the AT&T licence which at the end generated all the drama. Unix wars.
Again BSD is great if you don’t care about what will happen with your code.
Yeah the Android point doesn’t have any sense, that’s right.
Apple shares the code of the parts they want. Since it’s not a copyleft licence, then they can still ship you a version of Darwin + privative code as your macOs without sharing the entire code. So you end running kind of Frankenstein program with parts you don’t know what they do.
AOSP is not a great licence because it allows Google benefit from contributions, but then it has tons of privative software on top. So basically contributing to the AOSP means that you improve the code that later it’s used in combination with privative one.
My point is that libre source code should enforce that derivations of it stay libre. Otherwise you are working for free for companies that don’t care about the users.
Hey for companies is a good point. The best system for them is open source. It makes sense for them to use it. And open source is much better than just privative.
From the point of view of the individual user and developer is not that great. It kind of hooks you in because it has open source parts, but you are probably unaware of all the closed source stuff that runs in combination with it.
I get the open source point, but I don’t find it fair at the long term for the individual developer and user.
Over the years I’ve become convinced that the BSD license is great for code you don’t care about. I’ll use it myself. If there’s a library routine that I just want to say ‘hey, this is useful to anybody and I’m not going to maintain this,’ I’ll put it under the BSD license.
Linus Torvals at LinuxCon 2016
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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 😌
Bash is still in MacOS.
What’s wrong with ZSH? I was using it for 5+ years before it became the default over bash, mainly because of the auto complete features, oh-my-zsh and later just plugins and powerlevel10k.
I think they’re referring to the fact that bash is GPL while ZSH is licensed permissively
Got it
Oh I didn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I love oh-my-zsh. But it did feel like a bit of a cannery in the coal mine scenario when they elevated it the default and said they would phase out bash because of the GPL license.
I gotcha, I misunderstood. Cheers!
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.)
There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.
My cousin’s buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn’t feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.
I’m pretty sure the eventual conversion of every atom in the universe to computronium will run Linux.
it seems so innocent, lol
He was 22 years old. Pretty incredible.
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If you don’t like what they are doing with Linux, because it is free and open source, participate in people that are using it in ways that you do like that they do it, or do it yourself.
There is nothing stopping you
Azure don’t give a shit what it runs. Windows is on its own these days; if they succeed, good for them, but honestly I think the days of Microsoft just pretending to give a shit about Linux are long gone; it’s an important OS to them too.
I’ve worked for Microsoft for 12 years, still have lots of friends there so I get some of the vibe from that.
Friends don’t let friends use windows man. :p
That’s what he said
Putting Red hat in the same group as Google and Microsoft is wild.
That’s because Red hat recently started doing some Microsoft and Google like shit.
It’s not that far fetched, Google used to have somehow the same philosophy as current IBM-RedHat.
While Microsoft and Google merely pretend to like open source but transparently hate it, it is (was) not quite as obvious that red hat wanted to capture the enterprise Linux market wholesale. What red hat has done is terrible for the ecosystem, much more so than Microsoft just throwing out worthless tokens of appreciation.
You people are hilarious. Red Hat provides more GPL code than any company I can think of. Half of what people call GNU has Red Hat as the largest contributor.
Feels before reals.
Uh, Android is the alternative to Apple’s iOS. Android is much more customizable.
Which is kinda sad in its own way.
Think Different™ (But in the exact same way)
Think Different™ (Because we deprecated the service you liked and depended on because an internal team was jockeying for a higher position and rewrote what you loved but worse, so actually you are thinking different every year!)
Ehh, it’ll never take off.
Portable
Truly humble beginnings.
that’s all I have :-(
aww
We should make a donation campaign, pretty sure somebody has a spare SATA drive around. This minix clone sounds good
A few years ago there was a fantastic video detailing thorvald’s PC and it is a beast, crazy how far we’ve come
This one from LTT?
I remember him saying his gpu was “just some random rx580” which was a current GPU at the time.
Poor Linus :c
Ahh man only ata?
And an OS was born.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I was just thinking today about how I want a tattoo along the lines of “even the ones with digital watches”, great timing!
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Jfc im older than Linux
Me too man, but not by much
I’m OOTL, what’s the backstory here?
Linux
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
https://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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate
Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history.
It’s still used tho.
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
It wasn’t FOSS, but then neither was Linux originally.
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.
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.
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 ).
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.
386BSD was not available until some months after Linux was released, so you had GNU with no working kernel and BSD not yet available on the hardware he had, hardware a lot of normal people had. I think the GPL also felt more philosophically right to many of them, and it limited how much they needed to re-do work that someone else had already done but kept secret.
The AT&T lawsuit definitely hampered BSD growth just as it was ported to the 386, but it was filed after Linux was already a thing.
A microkernel teaching OS by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
In 2017 the world (including Tanenbaum) found out that the Intel Management Engine uses Minix internally. Intel just kind of did that silently. So Minix is still around.
Linux in the wild for the first time
“Just a hobby, won’t be big” - he really didn’t think it will be one of the most sought after projects.
Or wanted to appear non-threatening
“We will be in and out, 10 minutes”
Happy Birthday!
