Happy mother's day, Linus Torvalds

David M Williams
Sunday, 10 May 2009 07:57

Opinion and Analysis

Torvalds considered the name “Linux” for his project but felt it was possibly egotistical. He then leaned towards Freax, trying to merge the words freak, free and X (as an allusion to UNIX.)

Torvalds stored his work under the directory name Freax but the FTP administrator at the Helsinki University of Technology didn’t think this was a very good name. He thus titled the folder “Linux” without consulting Torvalds and it thus became known forevermore by this moniker.

Torvalds noted in his release notes for Linux 0.01 that a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library and other items. He consequently advocated the work of the GNU Project and encouraged people to contact GNU for more information on their work.

While GNU had always enjoyed a modicum of fame amongst UNIX users, it wasn’t until a free ‘386-based kernel became available that a real, genuine, advanced and fully-featured UNIX system hit the masses, eclipsing the success of MINIX earlier.

Consequently, the Linux name received vast acclaim and fanfare and Linux became the most popular adoption of GNU software. The name began to be used for the entire distribution of software, possibly to the chagrin of the GNU Project.

In 1994 Debian called their project Debian GNU/Linux, and in May 1996 Stallman attempted to popularise the term Lignux but this never caught on.

Today, both Debian and GNU continue to refer to “GNU/Linux” but it's undeniable that “Linux” has pretty much become the widespread common label for the combination.

Nevertheless, no matter your leaning on the naming, there can be no doubt we wouldn’t enjoy distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Slackware, Knoppix or any others without the work of Linus Torvalds, a Swedish-speaking Fin who just wanted to access University computers with the features provided by a '386 processor.

Happy Mother’s Day, Linus Torvalds.