Sexy Jihad

Kerneltrap has written an interesting brief history of http://kernel.org. Excerpt:

Peter Anvin has been involved with Linux since nearly the beginning. When Linus Torvalds purchased his first computer on which he began writing the Linux kernel, the state-of-the art PC with 4 megabytes of RAM and running at 33 megahertz was too expensive for him to buy outright. Therefore, he financed much of the nearly $3,500 price, planning to pay it off over three years. Within a year as the Linux kernel began to evolve and a community of users formed, Peter organized an online collection that raised $3,000 and paid it off.

Later, when Linus graduated from the University of Helsinki, Peter convinced him to move to California to work for Transmeta Corporation, where Peter himself had been working for about a year. At this point, the Linux Kernel Archives was born. “I’ve been taking care of kernel.org since its inception in 1997,” Peter explained. In the beginning, the archives were housed on a generic white-box PC running the Linux kernel, connected to the Internet through Transmeta’s T1. The idea was to provide Linus with a local server.

The ‘kernel.org’ domain name was picked because by that time in 1997 the more logical seeming Linux dot names were already taken. The Transmeta domain was intentionally not used to avoid creating the false perception that Transmeta owned Linux. “So kernel.org was taken as sort of a second choice,” Peter explained, “and it has worked out obviously very well, as today it’s instantaneously recognized as its own thing.”

All in all a fascinating piece on Kernel.org, one of the backbones of Linux Kernel distribution. If it wasn’t for well organized well maintained sites like this, the Open Source community would be nowhere.

Be Sociable, Share!

•