Community Matters

15 years ago today Linus released version 1.0 of Linux. It had been about two and a half years in the making: version 0.01 was released in August ’91 – I didn’t get started until a couple months later in Decmber ’91 with version 0.11 (0.10 which I tried the month before did’t like my 386sx/16). It’s so funny to see my old uni-wuerzburg.de address in that announcement… that’s been like three lifetimes ago.

The road to version 1.0 was longer than we thought… 0.99 went all the way to ‘patch level 15′ before Linus finally felt things were ready to be called 1.0. The version naming methodology back then was a little… archaic – things like Linux 0.99pl14.r. It’s much easier these days – Linux just released 2.6.29-rc8…

Too bad he missed out on releasing 2.6.29 on the anniversary. But then, dates like this are random and uninportant.