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30th anniversary of the Linux kernel

The jubilee birthday of the Linux kernel comes and goes (August 25), a miracle that changed the course of development of modern OSes. I use the word "miracle" because that's how it turned out in the end. The project, which the creator Linus Torvalds himself did not believe would come to life, is a global phenomena today. It is located all around us, the simplest example is of course the smartphone with Android. We are talking about 1.6 billion devices at the heart of which is the Linux kernel. The kernel is part of the operating systems that run our desktop computers, mainframes, supercomputers ...

Today, there is a large community gathered under the Linux Foundation, which maintains this project, led by the creator Linus. However, apart from the jubilee, is there any reason to celebrate?

A word or two about the Linux kernel

Као што сам већ написао творац Линукс кернела је Линус Торвалдс. Настао је за време његових студија далеке 1991. године, јер како каже волео је да види интеракцију кода са хардвером. Очигледно је то урадио веома добро, јер се то допало и великом броју људи који су прихватили идеју и наставили развој током година на челу са творцем лично. Поред интеркације са хардвером, остварена је велика интеракција са заједницом, на велико изненађење Линуса.

The first kernel (version 0.01) numbered about 12,000 lines of code and was intended for AT386 processors, written in programming language "C". You can see Linus' original message here. Today's version 5.13.13 (at the time of writing) has more than 30 million lines of code. Honestly, I have no idea what they packed into such a large and complex project. Adding a large number of new lines of code continues at a rate of about 2 million lines of code per year. I wonder how GIT withstands this :)

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Before the party starts, I will review the current situation in the world of Free Software. Things are not going great and large-scale changes are imminent that will affect the direction of development of Open Source Software.

The founder of The Free Software Foundation , Richard Stallman, was expelled from his own organization. Well, I admit that he is not the best PR of his foundation and that the performances can be strange, so this decision of the people from the Foundation may be somewhat logical. A man loves to curse in public, who would like the freedom to do that ?!

Another name that I will mention is Eric Raymond, the founder of The OpenSource Initiative was banned from communicating with other members of the Initiative. What was he doing, selling free software secrets on Darkweb ?!

I will just repeat the third name - Linus Torvalds - popularly speaking, and he is rocking an armchair in the Linux Foundation. If a person doesn't like Nvidia, he certainly has a good reason for it :)

These three names, of course, among many others, are the ones that enabled Free Software to take the place it has in the world today, and to put it mildly, they have been or will be thrown out.

Other events are also there, e.g. Microsoft has been a member of the Linux Foundation for 5 years. Whether Linux has turned into a big business, so they are here, or they simply came to learn and steal what they need for the new version of "Window$" remains an open question. What might be more worrying is that Google is working on its own version of the kernel.

A word or two for the end and congratulations to the penguin

It is interesting to follow all this, and what will really happen with Free Software - it is not known. It will certainly not disappear as such. The focus has shifted from GNU / Linux to other Linux-based technologies. Anyway, happy birthday to the angry penguin - Tux :)

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