Linux is 25 years old

Linus Torvalds himself



Time is running very fast, and the Linux operating system is already a quarter of a century old. It would be more correct to say that the kernel of this operating system has turned 25 years old. The general history of the advent of Linux is probably familiar to all Habrahabr readers. On August 25, 1991, five months after starting work on his project, 21-year-old Linus Torvalds (then a student) spoke about creating a prototype of a completely new OS called Linux.



On September 17, 1991, the first public release of the Linux kernel took place. The kernel version at that time is 0.0.1 . Already then the number of lines of kernel code was 10 thousand. Its size was only 62 KB in compressed form. Now the core has many times more code lines - as many as 19 million. If the OS was developed by a commercial organization, the cost of such a project would be about a billion US dollars, or even more.



Linus Torvalds decided to create a kernel after working with the MINIX operating system. She did not suit the student limited license. As usual, Torvalds tried to blame plagiarism. Namely, in that he simply copied the code to a number of MINIX subsystems. But experts managed to prove that it is not. MINIX author Andrew Tanenbaum himself compared the code of his OS and Linux, and came to the conclusion that there are only a few irrelevant coincidences in the code that you can ignore. These matches are due to a number of POSIX and ANSI C requirements.

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Interestingly, Linux might initially be called Freax ("free", "freak", and X (Unix)). This name was given to his project by Linus himself. But Ari Lemke (Ari Lemmke), who at the request of Linus laid out the kernel on his FTP server, called the directory with the kernel “linux”. Since its first release, the kernel has undergone many transformations. Here is a visual statistics:

• 0.0.1 - September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code;
• 1.0.0 - March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code;
• 1.2.0 - March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code;
• 2.0.0 - June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code;
• 2.2.0 - January 1999, 1.8 million lines of code;
• 2.4.0 - January 2001, 3.4 million lines of code;
• 2.6.0 - December 2003, 5.9 million lines of code;
• 2.6.28 - December 2008, 10.2 million lines of code;
• 2.6.35 - August 2010, 13.4 million lines of code;
• 3.0 - August 2011, 14.6 million lines of code.
• 3.5 - July 2012, 15.5 million lines of code.
• 3.10 - July 2013, 15.8 million lines of code;
• 3.16 - August 2014, 17.5 million lines of code.
• 4.1 - June 2015, 19.5 million lines of code.
• 4.7 - July 2016, 21.7 million lines of code.

The kernel is developed by third-party developers. According to the Linux Foundation, since 2005, 13,500 specialists have participated in the development of the system. The average speed of work on the system is 7.8 patches per hour. In the development of the system, not only independent developers, but also many representatives of large technological corporations are taking part. Among others, we can mention Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renesas, Google, AMD, Taxas Instuments and ARM.



“I am very pleased with the desktop version of Linux. Of course, I wanted Linux to capture the world of desktop PCs, but as it turned out, this area is very difficult to capture. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can spend another 25 years on this. I will achieve my long siege, ”said Linus Torvalds during his April speech at the Embedded Linux conference.



According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation organization, "in its 25 years, Linux looks solid ... The OS went further than we could expect." In his opinion, the operating system continues to evolve according to plan, and will exist in the distant future.







According to most Linux developers, this OS is extremely important. In particular, it has a definite influence on the path of human development. Today, Linux is far from a research project. Based on this OS, a huge number of corporate systems and supercomputers work. Based on this OS, Android OS and a number of other commercial projects were created. Linux has trading exchanges, banking and corporate systems. Linux has long been the main OS for data centers of a number of large and medium-sized companies.



“Working together, in which each participant improves, is a lofty goal, and it is of paramount importance,” said Jim Zemlin. “This is the manifestation of the magic of Linux and all of Open Source, and it is precisely to such results that the Linux movement came after 25 years.”



Well, it remains only to wish the developers of this OS future success and recognition. Linux helps to fight monopolists on the OS market, but even more, this operating system helps both companies and individual users to work. In the same mobile area at the moment the leader is the Android OS, based on the Linux kernel. According to several studies, the share of Linux in corporate systems and on desktops is increasing. Probably, this dynamic will continue in the future.



Happy birthday, Linux! Happy anniversary!