"I'm Doing an Operating System, Just a Hobby, Won't Be Big and Professional"

30 years ago today, August 25, 1991, an unknown Finnish student sent out what has become a famously low-key email that had a dramatic effect on technology in general, especially data centers and supercomputers. It has to be one of the most important emails of all time.

Here's what he said:

Or here in a readable form (not a graphic):

From: torvalds@klaava.Hels
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus

This was the birth of Linux, named after Linus of course. The majority of cloud data centers and all supercomputers today run on Linux. But is hard to remember just how much Linux was disparaged as just being a hobby that would never work out to be something serious. Of course, to be fair, Linus himself had said himself that it was just a hobby and wouldn't big and professional. Linux was an implementation of Unix (which I've called The Most Important Operating System Ever to the IBM-PC. It is undoubtedly the most well known and successful open-source software (OSS) product ever. One reason, a similar reason for Android's success, is that server manufacturers wanted an operating system without having to pay for it. You would sometimes hear 20 years ago that Linux was only worked on by hobbyists. But the reality is that it was worked on by a lot of people who were not paid for by any Linux organization since they had jobs at places like IBM, Dell, or the Department of Energy (DoE). 

At the time Linus started, Minix, another Unix-like operating system developed by Andrew Tanenbaum, was only available for academic use due to licensing restrictions. So Linux created his own based on some of the same concepts but without using any of the Minix code. I was more familiar with Tanenbaum in the context of computer networks because he wrote the standard work on the topic when I was lecturing at the University of Edinburgh on the topic.

I won't go over the whole history. Some of it is recounted in the post I linked to above. There is also a History of Linux Wikipedia page. But you can hear about the early days it from Linus himself in a piece titled Linux's History.

Git

Perhaps surprisingly, Linus Torvalds didn't just create and drive one big important open-source software project, but two. He was also the creator of Git, now the most important software source code management system on the planet, especially as it was the basis for Github, a repository for open-source projects that Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5B.

Linus' Law

Linus is also well known in the open-source community for Linus' Law, which states that:

With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

What this means is that an open-source project with a lot of developers will have an easier time diagnosing difficult bugs that a closed-source company where very few people probably work on any particular piece of code. Curiously, Linus didn't ever say this, Eric Raymond did, but he dedicated it to Linus by naming it after him.

Here's a fun coincidence. Yesterday I wrote about Dave Ditzel's company Esperanto. In the early 2000s, he founded and was the initial CEO at Transmeta. Linus Torvalds worked there too, for a time.

Learn More

Read an interview with Linus from earlier this year: 30 Years Of Linux—An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git - Part 1 and Part 2. Warning, you'll learn a lot more since it's 15,000 words long.

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