6. The Early Free Unixes
Into the gap left by the Free Software Foundation's uncompleted HURD
had stepped a Helsinki University student named Linus Torvalds. In
1991 he began developing a free Unix kernel for 386 machines using the
Free Software Foundation's toolkit. His initial, rapid success
attracted many Internet hackers to help him develop Linux, a full-
featured Unix with entirely free and re-distributable sources.
Linux was not without competitors. In 1991, contemporaneously with
Linus Torvalds's early experiments, William and Lynne Jolitz were
experimentally porting the BSD Unix sources to the 386. Most
observers comparing BSD technology with Linus's crude early efforts
expected that BSD ports would become the most important free Unixes on
the PC.
The most important feature of Linux, however, was not technical but
sociological. Until the Linux development, everyone believed that any
software as complex as an operating system had to be developed in a
carefully coordinated way by a relatively small, tightly-knit group of
people. This model was and still is typical of both commercial
software and the great freeware cathedrals built by the Free Software
Foundation in the 1980s; also of the freeBSD/netBSD/OpenBSD projects
that spun off from the Jolitzes' original 386BSD port.
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Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the
beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of
volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was
maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively
simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from
hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian
selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement
of almost everyone, this worked quite well.
By late 1993 Linux could compete on stability and reliability with
many commercial Unixes, and hosted vastly more software. It was even
beginning to attract ports of commercial applications software. One
indirect effect of this development was to kill off most of the
smaller proprietary Unix vendors -- without developers and hackers to
sell to, they folded. One of the few survivors, BSDI (Berkeley
Systems Design, Incorporated), flourished by offering full sources
with its BSD-based Unix and cultivating close ties with the hacker
community.
These developments were not much remarked on at the time even within
the hacker culture, and not at all outside it. The hacker culture,
defying repeated predictions of its demise, was just beginning to
remake the commercial-software world in its own image. It would be
five more years, however, before this trend became obvious.