In April 2005, the Linux kernel lost its version control system. The proprietary BitKeeper had taught developers the distributed workflow — and Larry McVoy withdrew the license after Andrew Tridgell reverse-engineered the protocol. Linus Torvalds did not return to tarballs and patches. In about ten days, he wrote Git: tree snapshots, content-addressed … Read more
In August 1993, a 20-year-old Purdue student was frustrated with Softlanding Linux System. Broken packages, a fragile installation, a distribution treated as an afterthought. Instead of continuing to patch SLS, Ian Ashley Murdock (Konstanz, April 28, 1973) announced that he would start from scratch — openly, in the spirit of GNU … Read more
At 14, Aaron Hillel Swartz (Highland Park, Illinois, November 8, 1986) helped write RSS 1.0. At 26, on January 11, 2013, he died in his Brooklyn apartment while the US Department of Justice was prosecuting him for downloading academic articles. Between those two points: Creative Commons, Markdown, Reddit, Open … Read more
On 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki told the comp.os.minix group he was doing “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)”. Thirty-five years later, the kernel born from that hobby runs most of the internet servers, … Read more
Few technology figures are as polarizing as Elon Reeve Musk (Pretoria, June 28, 1971). A visionary of reusable rockets and electric cars to some; a volatile manager and owner-operator of a conglomerate (Tesla, SpaceX/SpaceXAI, Neuralink, X) to others. Before that, he slept on an office floor, lost the PayPal CEO role while on a plane, and was … Read more
Free software did not begin in 2017, and it did not begin at Facebook. It began with GNU (1983), the kernel a Finnish student released as a hobby (1991), and the Open Source Initiative’s definition (1998). What the industry did afterward — … Read more
In 2005, two Germans from projektfarm GmbH, the same crew that maintained HowtoForge, published a panel to manage Linux hosting servers. Twenty-one years later, ISPConfig is still going strong. It continues under a BSD license, with no fee … Read more
