Books - 12 & 13 continued ...

Linux is an operating system and the most successful and commonly known open source software. In short it is free. It is inspired by Unix, another operating system, that was developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs in the late 1960s’. At that time AT&T was a regulated monopoly and it could not sell computers. AT&T made Unix freely available along with source license to the universities and the government so that programmers could tinker with it and improve it. By early 1990s’, Unix became a powerful and popular operating system though there were competing versions of the same.

Andy Tanenbaum, a University Professor in Amsterdam, wrote Minix, a Unix clone, as a teaching aid for Unix. Linus, a student of the University of Helsinki Finland, in order to overcome the shortcomings of Minix, started writing a programme for a new operating system, which was based on Unix. It was Linus’ Unix or simply Linux.

The book ‘Just for Fun'  is entertaining and offers an insight into how the mind of a creative developer works. The last few chapters of this book including the one on ‘Intellectual Property’ make interesting reading.  He says (on page 210),

So open source would rather use the legal weapon of copyright as an invitation to join in the fun, rather than as a weapon against others. It’s still the same old mantra: Make Love, Not War, except on a slightly more abstract level.

The book changed my ideas about intellectual property rights; perhaps will change yours too. And it proves that individuals do matter; they can change course of any industry. An inspiring book.