Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort

Source: Slashdot

Origins

Linus Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5 1991 via a Finnish FTP server. The snapshot contained about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross‑compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to name the project “Freax,” but his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the server, named the directory Linux instead.

Early Distribution

The first North American mirror was set up by early contributor Theodore Ts’o on his VAXstation at MIT. At the time, the sole 64 kbps link between Finland and the US made downloads painfully slow, so the MIT mirror gave developers across the Atlantic their first practical access to the kernel.

Patch Management

Another early developer, Dirk Hohndel, recalled that Torvalds initially discarded incoming patches and reimplemented the changes from scratch—a habit he later abandoned because it did not scale with the growing number of contributors.

Funding and Hardware Upgrade

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. The money allowed Torvalds to acquire a 486DX/2.

GPL Licensing and Distributions

In 1992, Torvalds moved the kernel to the GPL. The first full Linux distributions appeared in 1992‑1993, turning Linux from a kernel‑only project into installable operating systems.

Source: Slashdot.