Summary: In an interview, Linus Torvalds talks about Linux’s multiple 20th birthdays and life with Linux.
Linux’s Early Highlights
SJVN: Looking back at it all, what do you think the really significant releases were?
LT: For me personally, 0.03 was a big step, which is when Linux became self-hosting for the first time, I think. And 0.12 was when suddenly it was almost useful to some people, and you could actually do some limited real work with it (and when the aforementioned “hey, people I don’t know are using it†happened). Admittedly you had to be pretty hard-core to play around with it, but there are still active kernel developers around from that time-frame.
But realistically, “significant†for anybody else would come much later. 1.0 is obviously always a milestone (and took years to reach), and in many ways the really significant events ended up being not so much about releases, but about all the companies that started supporting it. And I’m not just talking the big Oracle and IBM announcements, but the much earlier events like the first (very small-scale) commercial distributions of floppies in ‘92 etc were even bigger events, and only indirectly related to my releases.
SJVN: In passing let me say I always thought the release of Linux 2.4 in 2001 was a big deal. That’s because it was the one that added serious support for clustering, multiple processors and vast amounts of RAM.
Along the way, who do you think helped you the most in turning Linux from being a way to get your hands dirty with operating system theory and practice to where it is today?
LT: I don’t think there is a single “whoâ€. There were all the people just testing and asking for features - and keeping me motivated. There were the actual early developers who started jumping in and sending me patches. And there were the people who did the first distributions–MCC, TAMU, SLS, Slackware, yadda, yadda. And then all the big companies.
It’s really been a lot of people.
SJVN: Looking ahead, any thoughts on where Linux will be at 40?
LT: Bah. I don’t plan that far ahead. I can barely keep my calendar for the next week in mind. I really have no idea.
SJVN: I know how that works! Thank you very much for your time.