Twenty years ago (yesterday, to be exact, but cut me some slack here), Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix, announcing that he was working on a free operating system and wanted to know what features people were interested in. The original message is on Google Groups here. So it's time for another brief nerd interlude:

peter@localhost:~$ uname
Linux

At some point I'll do a longer post on why the above is true, but for now I think I'll just let it stand by itself. Thanks, Linus, for starting it all 20 years ago, and thanks to all the developers and distributions who have kept it going.

For non-nerd readers, I promise I won't do this very often, but once in a while I just have to get these sorts of things out of my system. Does anyone else find the following (from a transcript of a short Unix shell session) a little weird?

peter@localhost:~$ true
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
0
peter@localhost:~$ false
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
1

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The answer can be summed up in one sentence:

Not every data structure is a list.

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In a recent post, Eric Raymond describes an alternate history in which the Internet and the World Wide Web never happened. In this alternate timeline, the DARPA research that led to the Internet never got out of the "research curiosity" stage, and instead of having one Internet, we have multiple "walled gardens" like Compuserve and AOL. It's not a pretty picture: imagine not being able to email, text message, or Facebook a friend just because you and they have different ISPs. Imagine also that there is no Linux, no open source software, no way for anyone except a dedicated hobbyist to have a computer that doesn't run proprietary programs that you can't see the insides of. Not to mention that censorship would be a lot easier on networks that did not have infrastructure specifically designed to make that as difficult as possible.

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It's a well-known custom for Linux users to rant about some aspect of their OS. Unlike the Mac community, which gushes about how wonderful their OS is, or the Windows community, whose writings about their OS often read like soldiers' letters home from a war zone, we Linux types view ranting as a force for change. Or at least, as an explanation of why we personally no longer use the festering pile of dung we are ranting about.

The particular festering pile under the microscope in this post is KDE 4.

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