Jeremy Garcia of LinuxQuestions.org and Bad Voltage (a podcast) delivers 25 years of Linux in five minutes: starting with Linux's first steps as "just a hobby" for creator Linus Torvalds, to its staggering popularity today with 135,000 developers from more than 1,300 companies and 22 million lines of code .
It's a lot to cover.
1991: Linux begins with Linus Torvalds' post to Usenet saying it's "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu."
1992: First GPL release of Linux; it was initially licensed under a custom license that had some commercial restrictions.
1993: After Linux was released under a GPL license, we begin to see the first distributions: Slackware and Debian. 100 developers working on Linux at this point.
1994: 1.0 release of Linux; the only machines supported were single-processor, i386 computers.
1995: 1.2 release of Linux; see more outside contributions to the kernel.
1996: Tux the mascot is created.
1999: 2.2 release of Linux; Linus Tovalds passes Linux maintenance to Alan Cox.
2001: 2.4 release of Linux; IBM pledges to spend 1 billion dollars on Linux, and a new maintainer steps up, Marcelo Tosatti.
2002: Linux development moves from patches and email to source control management.
2003: 2.6 release of Linux; SCO Group files a lawsuit against IBM.
2004: The commercialization of Linux increases; companies want regular releases.
2005: Linux has some licensing issues, so Linus writes Git and moves kernel development to it (very popular today).
2006: First LTS (long term support) release of Linux, lead by Greg Kroah-Hartman.
2009: Red Hat market cap equals market cap of Sun Microsystems, which at the time is the largest commercial Unix manufacturer.
2011: 3.0 release of Linux: Linus Torvalds says there's "no change."
2012: Linux server revenue sales equal that of the rest of the Unix market combined.
2015: 4.0 release of Linux: live patching.
2016: Over 135,000 developers from more than 1,300 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git; 22 million lines of code.
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