Celebrating the 28th Anniversary of the Linux Kernel

Exactly 28 years ago today, a 21-year-old student named Linus Torvalds made a fateful announcement on the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix. i-Programmer commemorates today's anniversary with some interesting trivia:Back in 1991 the fledgling operating system didn't have a name, according to Joey Sneddon's 27 Interesting Facts about Linux: Linux very nearly wasn't called Linux! Linus wanted to call his "hobby" project "FreaX" (a combination of "free", "freak" and "Unix"). Thankfully, he was persuaded otherwise by the owner of the server hosting his early code, who happened to prefer the name "Linux" (a combination of "Linus" and "Unix"). One fact I had been unaware of is that the original version of Linux wasn't open source software. It was free but was distributed with a license forbidding commercial use or redistribution. However, for version 0.12, released in 1992, the GPL was adopted making the code freely available. Android Authority describes the rest of the revolution:Torvalds announced to the internet that he was working on a project he said was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional." Less than one month later, Torvalds released the Linux kernel to the public. The world hasn't been the same since... To commemorate the nearly 30 years that Linux has been available, we compiled a shortlist of ways Linux has fundamentally changed our lives. - Linux-based operating systems are the number-one choice for servers around the world... As of 2015, web analytics and market share company W3Cook estimated that as many as 96.4% of all servers ran Linux or one of its derivatives. No matter the exact number, it's safe to say that the kernel nearly powers the entire web... - In Oct. 2003, a team of developers forked Android from Linux to run on digital cameras. Nearly 16 years later, it's the single most popular operating system in the world, running on more than 2 billion devices. Even Chrome OS, Android TV, and Wear OS are all forked from Linux. Google isn't the only one to do this either. Samsung's own in-house operating system, Tizen, is forked from Linux as well, and it's is even backed by The Linux Foundation. - Linux has even changed how we study the universe at large. For similar reasons cars and supercomputers use Linux, NASA uses it for most of the computers aboard the International Space Station. Astronauts use these computers to carry out research and perform tasks related to their assignments. But NASA isn't the only galaxy studying organization using Linux. The privately-owned SpaceX also uses Linux for many of its projects. In 2017, SpaceX sent a Linux-powered supercomputer developed by HP to space and, according to an AMA on Reddit, even the Dragon and Falcon 9 run Linux. "Without it," the article concludes, "there would be no science or social human development, and we would all still be cave-people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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