Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.
Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, on a Finnish FTP server -- about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross-compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the server, named the directory "Linux" instead. Early contributor Theodore Ts'o set up the first North American mirror on his VAXstation at MIT, since the sole 64 kbps link between Finland and the US made downloads painful. That mirror gave developers on this side of the Atlantic their first practical access to the kernel.
Another early developer, Dirk Hohndel, recalled that Torvalds initially threw away incoming patches and reimplemented them from scratch -- a habit he eventually dropped because it did not scale. When Torvalds could not afford to upgrade his underpowered 386, developer H. Peter Anvin collected checks from contributors through his university mailbox and wired the funds to Finland, covering the international banking fees himself. Torvalds got a 486DX/2. In 1992, he moved the kernel to the GPL, and the first full distributions appeared in 1992-1993, turning Linux from a kernel into installable systems.
Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, on a Finnish FTP server -- about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross-compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the server, named the directory "Linux" instead. Early contributor Theodore Ts'o set up the first North American mirror on his VAXstation at MIT, since the sole 64 kbps link between Finland and the US made downloads painful. That mirror gave developers on this side of the Atlantic their first practical access to the kernel.
Another early developer, Dirk Hohndel, recalled that Torvalds initially threw away incoming patches and reimplemented them from scratch -- a habit he eventually dropped because it did not scale. When Torvalds could not afford to upgrade his underpowered 386, developer H. Peter Anvin collected checks from contributors through his university mailbox and wired the funds to Finland, covering the international banking fees himself. Torvalds got a 486DX/2. In 1992, he moved the kernel to the GPL, and the first full distributions appeared in 1992-1993, turning Linux from a kernel into installable systems.
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