Daffodil International University
Faculty of Engineering => EEE => Topic started by: saikat07 on November 24, 2016, 01:22:02 PM
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Revolution was brewing on the European periphery in the summer of 1991. Years of struggle by outspoken rebels against the status quo were coming to a boil, and a way of life that once seemed unassailable neared its collapse.
Ask most historians to tell you about that revolution and they’ll describe the events that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As an attempted coup d’état by reactionary hard-liners failed and Boris Yeltsin outlawed the Communist Party, it became clear to the world that the radical fervor that began sweeping across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s would soon undo the once-mighty Soviet empire.
Yet, in another corner of Europe, a revolution of a different sort was stirring. No one—not even its chief instigator—recognized its significance. Nonetheless, the code that an irreverent Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds quietly unveiled in August 1991 has ended up touching at least as many lives as did the political upheavals of the late 20th century. I’m talking, of course, about Linux.
graphic link to Torvalds QA article
Photo: Ian White/Corbis
Read the Q&A with Linus Torvalds
Torvalds did not plan any of this. He was merely an “accidental revolutionary,” as he described himself in his autobiography, Just for Fun (2001, HarperBusiness). Almost unwittingly, he kick-started the free-software revolution—a movement that much more prominent programmers had been trying to get off the ground for years.
It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Linux, which celebrates its 25th birthday later this year, has so profoundly challenged the norms of software development. It showed programmers everywhere that a different world was possible—a world where they could share code openly, collaborate informally, and make a decent living, even if they gave away the chief product of their labor for free. The advantages of working this way have since become obvious to even the most hard-headed of business leaders, with most large software-development companies now sharing at least some of the fruits of their programmers’ efforts openly.
How did Linux end up producing such radical change? And why did other free-software activists’ attempts to build bigger and seemingly better systems than Linux fail to achieve as much momentum? With the insight that comes from retrospection, it’s now possible to answer those questions.
Of course, in 1991 it would have been ludicrous to suggest that Linux would end up as anything notable. Torvalds had less than two years of college-level work to his name when he started writing the Linux kernel—the code that manages an operating system’s core functions—early that year. He worked out of a sparse apartment in Helsinki, where his only computer was an off-the-shelf PC with an Intel 80386 processor, known colloquially as a “386.”
Meanwhile, two major teams of professional programmers at some of the world’s most elite computer-science research labs were developing other free-software kernels. (The term open-source software, more commonly used to describe Linux and similar efforts today, did not come into vogue until 1998.) These teams had each spent years laboring to create a kernel that could do what Linux alone ultimately did.
One team was working on an operating system known as Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, which had been in development since the late 1970s at the University of California, Berkeley. BSD was initially conceived as an enhanced version of the Unix operating system, whose code was owned by AT&T. But the BSD project evolved into an endeavor to create a Unix clone that was completely free of AT&T code.