{"id":750,"date":"2026-09-06T19:36:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T22:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2026\/09\/linux-35-anos-em-35-fatos\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T11:48:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:48:44","slug":"linux-35-anos-em-35-fatos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/linux-35-anos-em-35-fatos\/","title":{"rendered":"How Linux Conquered the World: 35 Years in 35 Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Mascote do LinuxPro na jornada do PC dos anos 90 at\u00e9 servidores, o bolso e Marte, com o Tux cl\u00e1ssico na mesa\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/linux-35-anos-em-35-fatos-v4.webp\" width=\"1486\" height=\"856\" \/><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Video summary:<\/strong> this article is a detailed summary of the video <em>\u201cHow Linux Took Over the World: 35 Years in 35 Facts\u201d<\/em>, from the channel <strong>Jono Bacon<\/strong> \u2014 former Ubuntu community lead at Canonical.<br \/>\n<strong>Video URL:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Ffl2DFHoZdY\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Ffl2DFHoZdY<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"video-container\" style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:1.5em 0;\">\n  <iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ffl2DFHoZdY\" title=\"How Linux Took Over the World: 35 Years in 35 Facts\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<p>On 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student wrote a sentence that Jono Bacon calls \u201cone of the most catastrophically wrong predictions in the history of technology\u201d: <em>\u201cjust a hobby, won't be big and professional\u201d<\/em>. Thirty-five years later, that hobby left a room in Helsinki and reached the surface of Mars. Bacon tells this saga in <strong>35 facts \u2014 one for each year<\/strong>. We've gathered the most striking ones here, grouped by chapter. (Complements our anniversary post, <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/linux-35-anos\/\">Linux turns 35<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p><!-- more --><\/p>\n<h2>The Improbable Beginning (1991\u20131994)<\/h2>\n<p>The first fact is the Usenet message. The second is delightful: Linus wanted to call the system <strong>\u201cFreax\u201d<\/strong> (free + freak + Unix) \u2014 a terrible name. It was <strong>Ari Lemke<\/strong>, the volunteer who ran the university's FTP server, who hated the name so much that he created a directory called <code data-no-translation=\"\">linux<\/code> on his own, without consulting Linus. The most important software on the planet may have been named by a sysadmin exercising a silent veto.<\/p>\n<p>The version <strong>0.01 had 10.239 lines of code<\/strong> \u2014 you could read it all in a weekend (keep that number). Within a few months, strangers started contributing: <strong>Ted Ts'o<\/strong>, from North America, came in without a contract or payment and, three decades later, still maintains the <strong>ext4<\/strong>. In January of 1992 came the decision Linus would call \u201cthe best he ever made\u201d: relicensing the kernel under the <strong>GPLv2<\/strong> \u2014 the legal engine that transformed generosity into durable infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"translation-block\">That same month, the respected professor <strong>Andrew Tanenbaum<\/strong> published the academic verdict: <em>\u201cLinux is obsolete\u201d<\/em>, for using a monolithic design instead of a microkernel. Keep the word \u201cobsolete\u201d \u2014 we'll come back to it in 2017. In 1993 and 1994 came <strong>Slackware<\/strong> (by Patrick Volkerding, still the oldest active distro today) and <strong>Debian<\/strong> \u2014 which Ian Murdock named by combining <em>Deb<\/em>orah, his girlfriend, with <em>Ian<\/em>. His story is at <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-de-ian-murdock\/\">The history of Ian Murdock<\/a>. The kernel 1.0 (1994) already had 176 thousand lines and was celebrated with champagne and folding chairs in an auditorium in Helsinki.<\/p>\n<h2>The Penguin and the Arrival of Money (1996\u20132001)<\/h2>\n<p class=\"translation-block\">Linus was bitten by a penguin at an Australian zoo and joked that he had caught \u201cpenguinitis\u201d \u2014 hence <strong>Tux<\/strong>, designed by Larry Ewing in 1996 with free software. Companies spend fortunes on mascots that say nothing; this one cost a bite and means everything. Then came the desktops (<strong>KDE<\/strong> in 1996, <strong>GNOME<\/strong> in response), and Wall Street went crazy: <strong>Red Hat<\/strong> went public in 1999, and VA Linux surged ~698% on its first day \u2014 a record that lasted 25 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"translation-block\">In December 2000, <strong>IBM announced US$ 1 billion<\/strong> in investment in Linux \u2014 and the debate over whether that was \u201cserious business\u201d ended right there. The empire's response came in 2001: Microsoft's then-CEO, <strong>Steve Ballmer, called Linux a \u201ccancer\u201d<\/strong>. Keep that quote in mind \u2014 the turnaround comes in 2016.<\/p>\n<h2>Processes, Git, and the Foundation (2003\u20132008)<\/h2>\n<p class=\"translation-block\">Not everything was a party. In 2003, the <strong>SCO group sued IBM<\/strong>, raising the claim to US$ 5 billion and threatening companies that used Linux \u2014 the case hung over the community for years until SCO went bankrupt. In 2005, a license conflict stripped proprietary version control from the project, and an annoyed Linus wrote <strong>the foundation of Git in about ten days<\/strong> \u2014 the foundation of platforms like GitHub and GitLab (see <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-do-git\/\">The history of Git<\/a>). The same Finn created two of computing's most influential tools.<\/p>\n<p>In 2007, the <strong>Linux Foundation<\/strong>, was born, with an unusual task: help competing companies cooperate around a technology none of them could control. It employs Linus and Greg Kroah-Hartman without deciding a line of code \u2014 developers govern the kernel, the foundation protects the surroundings.<\/p>\n<h2>The penguin in your pocket (2008\u20132014)<\/h2>\n<p>In October 2008, <strong>Android<\/strong> reached the market with the Linux kernel at its heart \u2014 and passed 3 billion active devices in 2021. Around 2010, an analysis showed that <strong>~75% of kernel contributions came from developers paid by companies<\/strong>. A betrayal of the volunteer spirit? Bacon disagrees with a great line: \u201cit is not selling out, it is winning so hard that the winners switched sides.\u201d Then came the <strong>Raspberry Pi<\/strong> (2012, US$ 35, more than 60 million sold), <strong>systemd<\/strong> (2010, adopted despite the flame wars), and, in 2013, <strong>Docker<\/strong> \u2014 which did not invent containers but made them easy (see <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-do-docker\/\">The history of Docker<\/a>). And there was the famous 2012 moment when Linus raised his middle finger at Nvidia onstage \u2014 years later, Nvidia opened its kernel modules (the current relationship is in <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-nvidia\/\">The history of NVIDIA<\/a>).<\/p>\n<h2>The price of success (2014\u20132018)<\/h2>\n<p>Success created a new enemy: Linux itself. In 2014, <strong>Heartbleed<\/strong> exposed a catastrophic flaw in OpenSSL \u2014 software that protected half the internet and was maintained by <strong>practically one developer receiving ~US$ 2.000\/year<\/strong> in donations. The industry responded by creating the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund the projects sustaining \u201cdigital civilization.\u201d And the turnaround Bacon promised arrived: in 2016, <strong>Microsoft \u2014 the \u201ccancer\u201d company \u2014 joined the Linux Foundation<\/strong> as a platinum member; today more than 60% of Azure cores run Linux workloads.<\/p>\n<p>In November 2017, payback for Professor Tanenbaum: <strong>the world's 500 largest supercomputers all ran Linux \u2014 all 500<\/strong>, a situation that has persisted ever since. \u201cProfessor, how is \u2018obsolete\u2019 doing?\u201d In 2018, the emergency response to Meltdown\/Spectre \u2014 coordinated secretly by <strong>Greg Kroah-Hartman<\/strong> \u2014 showed how years of quiet stewardship pay off in a crisis.<\/p>\n<h2>Mars, Rust and the 40 million lines (2018\u20132025)<\/h2>\n<p>In September 2018, Linus did something rare for powerful institutions: <strong>he publicly acknowledged that his behavior had hurt people<\/strong> and took time off to change \u2014 returning with the same demand for quality, but a less sharp tongue. In April 2021, NASA's helicopter <strong>Ingenuity flew on Mars running Linux<\/strong>: thousands of open-source contributors can literally say that something they helped build flew on another planet.<\/p>\n<p>In 2022, the <strong>Steam Deck<\/strong> (Arch + KDE) made it hard to say with a straight face that \u201cLinux cannot run games\u201d; and <strong>Rust<\/strong> entered kernel 6.1 \u2014 the first major new language accepted alongside C in decades. In 2024, the <strong>XZ Utils backdoor<\/strong> \u2014 one of the most sophisticated supply-chain attacks ever attempted \u2014 was stopped because a Microsoft engineer noticed <strong>half a second<\/strong> of SSH slowdown. And the final fact: in January 2025, the kernel <strong>crossed 40 million lines<\/strong> (remember the initial 10.239?). A Harvard and Toronto study estimated at <strong>US$ 8,8 trillion<\/strong> the cost of recreating the value free software delivers today.<\/p>\n<h2>Timeline: 35 years in milestones<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>25\/08\/1991<\/strong> \u2014 Linus Torvalds announces on Usenet the \u201chobby\u201d that \u201cwill not be big and professional\u201d;<\/li>\n<li><strong>09\/1991<\/strong> \u2014 version 0.01: 10.239 lines; Ari Lemke creates the directory <code data-no-translation=\"\">linux<\/code> on FTP and buries the name \u201cFreax\u201d;<\/li>\n<li><strong>01\/1992<\/strong> \u2014 kernel relicensed under the <strong>GPLv2<\/strong>; Tanenbaum declares \u201cLinux is obsolete\u201d;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1993<\/strong> \u2014 the birth of <strong>Slackware<\/strong> (July) and <strong>Debian<\/strong> (August);<\/li>\n<li><strong>03\/1994<\/strong> \u2014 kernel <strong>1.0<\/strong>, with 176 thousand lines, celebrated in Helsinki;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1996<\/strong> \u2014 Larry Ewing draws <strong>Tux<\/strong>; KDE is born (GNOME comes in 1997);<\/li>\n<li><strong>1999<\/strong> \u2014 IPO of <strong>Red Hat<\/strong>; VA Linux rises ~698% on its first day;<\/li>\n<li><strong>12\/2000<\/strong> \u2014 IBM announces <strong>US$ 1 billion<\/strong> in Linux;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2001<\/strong> \u2014 Ballmer calls Linux a <em>\u201ccancer\u201d<\/em>;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2003<\/strong> \u2014 SCO sues IBM and haunts the community for years;<\/li>\n<li><strong>04\/2005<\/strong> \u2014 Linus writes the foundation of <strong>Git<\/strong> in about ten days;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2007<\/strong> \u2014 creation of the <strong>Linux Foundation<\/strong>;<\/li>\n<li class=\"translation-block\"><strong>10\/2008<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Android<\/strong> reaches the market with the Linux kernel;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2010<\/strong> \u2014 the arrival of <strong>systemd<\/strong>; ~75% of kernel contributions are already corporate;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2012<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Raspberry Pi<\/strong> at US$ 35; Linus's finger at Nvidia;<\/li>\n<li class=\"translation-block\"><strong>2013<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Docker<\/strong> popularizes containers;<\/li>\n<li><strong>04\/2014<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Heartbleed<\/strong> exposes OpenSSL's underfunding; the Core Infrastructure Initiative is born;<\/li>\n<li class=\"translation-block\"><strong>11\/2016<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Microsoft<\/strong> joins the Linux Foundation;<\/li>\n<li><strong>11\/2017<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>500 out of 500<\/strong> largest supercomputers run Linux;<\/li>\n<li><strong>01\/2018<\/strong> \u2014 coordinated response to <strong>Meltdown\/Spectre<\/strong>;<\/li>\n<li><strong>09\/2018<\/strong> \u2014 Linus takes a break and returns with a less sharp tongue;<\/li>\n<li><strong>04\/2021<\/strong> \u2014 the helicopter <strong>Ingenuity<\/strong> flies on Mars running Linux;<\/li>\n<li><strong>2022<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>Steam Deck<\/strong> on the market; <strong>Rust<\/strong> enters kernel 6.1 (December);<\/li>\n<li><strong>03\/2024<\/strong> \u2014 the backdoor in <strong>XZ Utils<\/strong> stopped because of half a second of SSH slowdown;<\/li>\n<li><strong>01\/2025<\/strong> \u2014 kernel crosses <strong>40 million lines<\/strong>;<\/li>\n<li class=\"translation-block\"><strong>25\/08\/2026<\/strong> \u2014 <strong>35 years<\/strong> since the announcement \u2014 and the \u201chobby\u201d supports everything from the cloud to Mars.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The lesson of 35 facts<\/h2>\n<p>Bacon closes with what matters: nobody <em>should<\/em> have built this. No board approved version 0.01, no investor funded it. A student wrote 10 thousand lines, gave them away, and shrugged. Then strangers appeared \u2014 Ted Ts'o, Volkerding, Ian Murdock, Greg KH, Andres Freund, and thousands of others \u2014 and stopped being strangers. Linux's most innovative part, he says, is not the source code, it is the <strong>social machine<\/strong> that grew around it. Living proof that betting on open source, global collaboration, and technical merit is still the best bet \u2014 the same thesis running through <a href=\"\/en\/2017\/08\/a-historia-do-unix\/\">the origins of UNIX<\/a> and the <a href=\"\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-de-linus-torvalds\/\">history of Linus Torvalds<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The original 35-minute video is worth watching \u2014 it is one of the best Linux retrospectives ever made.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Video summary: this article is a detailed summary of \u201cHow Linux Took Over the World: 35 Years in 35 Facts\u201d from Jono Bacon, former Ubuntu community leader at Canonical. Video URL: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Ffl2DFHoZdY On August 25, 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student wrote a sentence that Jono Bacon \u2026 <a title=\"How Linux Conquered the World: 35 Years in 35 Facts\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/linux-35-anos-em-35-fatos\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Como o Linux dominou o mundo: 35 anos em 35 fatos\">Read more<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25,111],"tags":[279,131,4,112,358],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-noticias","category-opensource","tag-historia","tag-kernel","tag-linux","tag-opensource","tag-torvalds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1426,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}