The 25th anniversary of Linux has been celebrated recently. I can’t remain silent about it because Linux has been playing an important role in my life.
In 1980’s, Richard Stallman started a heroic and successful effort to create a free operating system in response to the unfortunate dominance of proprietary operating systems. But in 1990’s, his GNU project was still missing a very important part – the operating system kernel. This gap was filled in by Linus Torvalds when he started working on a new operating system kernel called Linux and decided to publish it under the GNU General Public License.
I’m not sure why exactly Linux took the place and became so popular. Perhaps it was the right thing coming at the right moment. When I first heard about Linux, it was IIRC around 1993, it looked like an amazing alternative to the world dominated by the unbelievably inferior Microsoft systems, complemented by proprietary Unix systems that were anything but a suitable operating systems for a student’s PC. The only real alternative to DOS and its graphical add-on called Windows was the BSD family of systems. But Linux, perhaps due to being a young system, was less hardware demanding and I could run it, including the X Window System, on my PC equipped with 4 MB RAM. I abandoned DOS/Windows and soon switched to using GNU/Linux exclusively.
It was a lucky choice and it founded the direction of my professional carrier. I didn’t bother to pick the best things from different worlds and to use different operating systems for different purposes. I instead focused on the right thing and solving the numerous problems I faced when I started using GNU/Linux. I learned that freedom has its price but when one is ready to pay it without looking aside, it brings a great revenue.
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for more than half of my life. The proprietary vendors who tried to lock users inside their proprietary systems, similarly as they try to do today with e.g. smartphones and IoT devices (despite they often run on top of the Linux kernel!), have failed to put the advancing free operating system to irrelevance. I can still use GNU/Linux and I can make my living by developing free software on Linux.
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