Linus Torvalds --From Prologue. The HAcker Ethic. "to the hacker a computer is also enteratainment. Not the games, not the pretty pictures on the Net. The computer itself is entertainment." (xvii) "The reason that Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting, and they like to share this intersting thing with others. Suddenly, you get bouth entertainment from the fact that you are doing something interesting, and you alsgo get the social part. This how you have this fundamentla Linux networking effect where you have a lot of hackers working together because they enjoy what they do." xviii motivation of hackers to tick Linux, is entertainment. "Entertainment is something intrinsically interesting and challenging."xv Quest for enterteining. more than just playing games. ***************** Linux Torvalds Wins Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica May 29, 1999, 12 :42 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (5854 reads) Thanks to Pekka Riikonen for this link. "The Golden Nica for .net (US-$ 8,620/ Euro 7.267) goes to Linus Torvalds of Finland for the operating system "Linux". "The Jury of the .net category awards the 1999 Golden Nica to Linus Torvalds as representing all of those, who have worked on this project in past years and will be participating in it in the future. One of the most important arguments for the jury was the fact that Linux is the first product to come out of the cyberspace of the Internet, which has had an enormous impact on the "real" world. In addition, Linux could only have been created in this form on and with the Internet. This Golden Nica is also intended to be a sign that the .net category is not a prize for the most beautiful or most interesting homepage on the World Wide Web. This prize is for all projects on the net. It is also intended to spark a discussion about whether a source code itself can be an artwork." ******************* he initial post that Linus made about Linux was to the comp.os.minix Usenet group titled, "What would you like to see most in minix". It began: "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)." Later in the same thread, Linus went on to talk about how unportable the code was: "Simply, I'd say that porting is impossible. It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies). "It also uses every feature of gcc I could find, specifically the __asm__ directive, so that I wouldn't need so much assembly language objects. Some of my 'C'-files (specifically mm.c) are almost as much assembler as C. It would be 'interesting' even to port it to another compiler (though why anybody would want to use anything other than gcc is a mystery). "Unlike minix, I also happen to LIKE interrupts, so interrupts are handled without trying to hide the reason behind them (I especially like my hard-disk-driver. Anybody else make interrupts drive a state-machine?). All in all it's a porters nightmare. " Indeed, Linux 1.0 was released on March 13th, 1994 supporting only the 32-bit i386 architecture. However, by the release of Linux 1.2 on March 7th, 1995 it had already been ported to 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit SPARC, and the 64-bit Alpha. By the release of Linux 2.0 on June 9th, 1996 support had also been added for the 32-bit m68k and 32-bit PowerPC architectures. And jumping forward to the Linux 2.6 kernel, first released in 2004, it has been and continues to be ported to numerous additional architectures. http://kerneltrap.org/node/14002 ************ On January 5, 1991[12] he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC[13] Although Torvalds believes "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software.[20 About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself.[17] Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.[24] Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors[25] use of it chiefly through the Linux Mark Institute. I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: ``I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.'' Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein famously wrote of one of his characters, too lazy to fail. ER