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Want to Laugh? Another Tall Tale About Where Linux Came From.

By Pamela Jones et al.

This is so funny. Yet another "history" of Linux.

I'm deep into writing an article on the Apple-Psystar litigation, to rebut some of the absolute nonsense I see being written about it, but I have to take a brief detour to share something with you, so you can laugh too. I put in News Picks a couple of days ago the farewell letter of ex-hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahdelt, who is one of the few who predicted the current Wall Street meltdown, and one of the things he suggested was that great minds get together and come up with a new "system of government that truly represents the common man's interest....This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft's near monopoly."

This seems to have seriously twisted someone's neurons in a bunch, and here's part of George Byron's response on Seeking Alpha:

Linux was created by IBM, HP (HPQ) and other former IT systems monopolists that realized that Microsoft was taking their systems monopoly away from them. IBM, HP, Digital Equipment (now part of HP), etc. had banded together for this purpose in the early 1980s while Linus Torvalds, the nominal creator of Linux and who now works for one of the groups IBM, HP, etc. put together for its trust-like purposes, was still in short pants. Ten years later, the consortium chose a small piece of software code, "forked" by Linus from some other code while he was in college, to complement the still ongoing technical development effort by IBM, HP, etc. to come up with "one Unix." What is today called Linux is the result of that one-Unix effort.

Isn't that hilarious? To be fair, those Wall Street dudes are likely under a lot of stress nowadays. If he needs a job, maybe he should write a column with "Paul Murphy", who also comes up with his own histories on the birth of Linux. I see a match. Or he could write for ADTI, methinks. They tried to allege that Linus forked Minix, but it's a lie. Anyway, Linus already confessed. The father of Linux is the Tooth Fairy.

It is sooooooo hard for traditional businessfolks to comprehend that people would write software on purpose because they want to, without an economic goal, and without the help and direction of the Big Boys. But they did. It is more than hilarious to contemplate the mental picture of Richard Stallman being a secret enterprise operative. That's who started the ball rolling in the '80s, by the way, not IBM, not HP, not any corporate entity. See what happens when you don't call it GNU/Linux? It leads to serious confusion as to the birth of the software the world is adopting.

I also find it hilarious to imagine any corporate counsel inventing the General Public License, the GPL, which was deliberately designed to keep greedo corporations and even individuals from being able to ruin the community's work.

And it worked! Thank you, Mr. Stallman.

To this very day corporations struggle to see anything good in the GPL, and they try to step over and around it at every turn, like Queen Elizabeth coping with puddles threatening her delicate slippers. Yes. All of them struggle with it. Some eventually come through it, some finally adopt it, but they never, ever in a million years would have released one byte of code under the GPL if they could have avoided it. Nevah. Let me tell you what really happened.

Full post as published by Groklaw on October 19, 2008 (boomark / email).