Happy Birthday Linux

Linux Turns 26 Years Old

Sticker Design from Unix Stickers! (http://bit.ly/unixstickers)

26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.

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 PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.

It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never

will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.

The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.

While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.

Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years, which includes the software outside of the Kernel that has made Linux, or GNU/Linux so viable.