I have always been a history enthusiast. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about history in the context of computers. I am therefore interested in learning more about significant events and people like Richard stallman and all the related events such as Windows refund day. I am interested to read and explore the timeline, I suppose a book would be ideal but any good resource such as a youtube series would be great too.
Update: I am happy to recieve such wide variety of resources to explore, I hope this post might help someone who is interested in FOSS history in the future too.
I can recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I’ve read multiple times. I can also recommend Linus’ autobiography Just For Fun.
You can also consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar… though ESR can be a bit much.
That said, here are some random articles I’ve saved that you might be interested in:
Can also recommend Just For Fun - that Finnish sense of humour doesn’t come across well, and while he’s good with English he certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but it does fly by.
History of Linux, abridged: Linus was using Minix on his own PC while at University, but was a bit fed up with its networking capabilities, so he’d written a toy operating system for a couple of his classes. While experimenting with adding features to it, he deleted his Minix partition by accident. Might as well continue with the one he’d written, since it was almost capable enough to be a daily driver. Publish the source, get a few collaborators in to add in the features that they found most useful, repeat. Boom.
It’s certainly older but Revolution OS is pretty thorough.
One thing I found annoying in that was Torvalds saying something along the lines of “think of Stallman as the philosopher and me as the engineer”. Yes, Stallman can be thought of as a “philosopher” but he is also an “engineer”, he wrote a hell of a lot of code for GNU, which wouldn’t exist without him anyways. It just seems like downplaying how important he was for the rise of this system.
Overall I think it’s good, though.
I think that has more to do with Stallman having a reputation for being a dick than anything else—people don’t like to give a lot of credit to people they don’t like very much.
I’ve never met Stallman though, so I can’t say what he’s like personally—I’m just going off what I read from bigger nerds than me.
He’s said some really sus shit and been accused of sexual harassment by several people. https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88. Even more sus is stallman’s multiple, passionate, defenses of pedophilia, and the very lukewarm walking back.
Don’t know of anything like that against Linus, at all.
I know you want to go deeper, but here’s a nice summary of linux’s early history: https://lwn.net/Articles/928581/
Read the GNU Manifesto. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
I think it gives a pretty good insight to what was going through Stallman’s mind when he kickstarted the GNU project and the software freedom movement. There are also footnotes added later to clarify some things (like the use of “free”)
This page might also be interesting to you. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html#gnu-history
There’s also a biography turned autobiography of Stallman. I think it’s called Free as in Freedom 2.0.
Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds is a good source. Very readable.
