2. How can Linux be born?
Several months ago, I joined a mailing list. From the list, I got
to know a lot of new friends. Some of them were from Spain. Some
of them were in the Asia. I was glad to have friends around the
world. With the help of them, I knew a new friend, Linux. I told
my friends I had three PCs. The oldest one’s CPU was Intel
80386. The latest one’s was Pentium 3. The other one was
80486. I was worried that I had to buy a new one because it was
said Intel would distribute 1GMHZ CPU! One friend from China
laughed at me. He said he would never change his PC any more
because he did not use Windows any longer! I was very strange
with that. Did not use Windows. Which one was instead? Linux. I
have known Linux for only three months. Although now I cannot
pronounce it correctly because there are several different
pronouncing ways of it, I begin to love the OS. Actually, Linux
survives my two old PCs. You might not believe that my two old
PCs can run faster than my latest one which is installed Windows
98! It is much ironically that after installing an emulating
product on my old PCs, which can enable MS applications on Linux,
the running speed of Windows Word on Linux is higher than on
Windows! What a nightmare when we compare Windows with Linux.
Who designed Linux? How can Linux be born? It is the contribution
of Internet. A guy named Linus began his wonderful tour in
University of Helsinki seven years ago. His professor designed a
software which could realize parallel computing on a PC. Linus
was very interested in the program. So he began to run it on
80386 machine. Meanwhile, he thought he could achieve more if
developing the program continually. Some time later, he completed
a kernel module which looked like the kernel of UNIX. He was very
satisfied with it so that he published his achievement on the
web. The difference of his action from software companies was
that he not only posted the software but also the source codes!
The following things happened to the software were very critical
to the world’s software industry. Maybe we can call it a
revolution to software development. Thousands of software fans
around the world were attracted by the outstanding software Linus
designed. They began to complete a great job voluntarily. All of
them designed their own codes and published them though Internet.
Several months later, a new Operating System was generated. It
was called Linux. Now we can not only enjoy the advantages of
free Linux but also can get the source codes of Linux. If we
like, we can modify the operating system by ourselves. We can
make the system more suitable to our system and even can design
our own functions because of having source codes. Software design
is now not a patent belonging to some organizations but a sharing
sky for all of the people who want to fly.