Stories in FOSS

Richard Stallman

Richard stallman is the President of the Free Software Foundation.He always hate rules that hold programmers from creating good softwares and sharing it with the whole world .That was obvious When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1977 installed passwords in their system .Stallman didn't like that ,so he broke the passwords,sent messages to all users containing their password systems and suggesting to change it to just ENTER .The amazing part that 20% of the users followed him !

Stallman began to think in freedom software movement when Brian Reid in 1979 placed "time bombs" in Scribe to restrict access to the software.Stallman said "it is a crime against humanity.".He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a "crime".

So,in 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which showed his desire to create a free operating system called GNU, that would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement.That was the beginning of free software principles.

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Larry Augustin

CEO of SugarCRM and the former chairman of VA Software, now known as SourceForge, Inc

In open source community. You can do incredible things by starting from where others end. That was what Larry Augustin did .His first experience in free software came in 1989 or early 1990 while working as graduate student at Stanford university in computer design tools . In Software Freedom Foundation he found python but it was working with C , so he modified it and create python C++ ,he loved this technique to take one piece of software and adapted it to your needs ,so he put it up again in the internet and was amazed by the people who took it . In his job interview he found out that the company was using python C++ and he told them that he was the author of it!

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Linus Torvalds

If you didn't like the current software you are working with . Then write your own ,let people around the world work with you.Together you will make the best.That is the story of Linus Torvalds.He studied computer science in 1988 at the University of Helsinki . After buying a PC with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tannenbaum. Linus was disappointed of the system which wasn't suitable for his needs. So Linus decided to develop a system independently of Minix. These were the first steps toward creating Linux.

In August, 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system .The announcement was extremely simple it was:

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: <1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
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 (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
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 :-(.

Linus uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux belonged to the world and now Linux kernel reveals that the number of lines of all its source code surpasses 10 million !

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