This week, thirty years ago, Linus, all of 21 years old, sent out his now famous email announcing his new “just a hobby” project, Linux, to the world. More precisely, to the guys at the Minix USENET newsgroup, on 25 August 1991.
As we all now know, Linux has grown to undreamed-of proportions, powering much of the world’s hardware: from tiny embedded systems, all Android devices (they run the Linux kernel), to mega enterprise and cloud servers, and everything in-between (am writing this on a laptop running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS).
This brief note is, really, to pen down my deep gratitude to Linus Torvalds and the thousands of contributors to Linux; why? It has directly impacted me very much, pretty much setting my adult career path (at least so far!). My passion for learning the inner workings of this wonderful opensource operating system has opened up new avenues for me, and helped me be reasonably successful at what I do (I train folks on the Linux OS, for over 25 years now)… I also am a practitioner, do consulting work on Linux, and have written three books on Linux programming (kernel programming books, system programming book).
I like to think of the books (and my small projects on GitHub) as a small way of contributing back to this awesome community. Am hoping to contribute more, as I go along… (already working on the next book, on kernel debugging!).
Thanks and Cheers to the Linux OS, to the Linux Foundation leading the way forward, and awaiting it’s next few, of many, decades of world dominance!
Must-see’s:
kaiwanTECH: Kaiwan's Tech Blog 