Linuxcon: 20 years of Linux at Intel

DAY TWO of Linuxcon Europe included a keynote from Intel about the last 20 years of Linux since its creation.

Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux technologist at Intel, gave the talk this morning and counts himself lucky to be one of the people to get involved at the very early stages of the project with Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.

He confessed that none of the people involved ever expected to be in a room of 1,000 people giving a talk on the last two decades of Linux and for there to be conferences around the globe.

Hohndel said, "It's more than just the conferences. It's the billions of dollars that are part of the Linux industry, that are being spent on Linux, that are being created with Linux."

The impact that Linux has had on the world was not something that was dreamt about back when it all began, he explained, and for the group of early adopters it was about creating something because they could.

"It was never about the big goal, never about the vision, never about the thing we can achieve with this," he admitted.

"To me this is one of the key reasons, and that was the timing. The internet was becoming accessible, more universities were connecting, even private individuals were connecting," he added.

"Timing in the sense that these big beefy machines were finally machines with the necessary features, with enough memory and a strong enough instruction set, were becoming affordable to the individual."

The people who were involved were a key element to the success of Linux, he explained, and there was a focus on getting other people involved, getting them to send patches and point out problems so they could be fixed.

"Fundamentally, twenty years ago this was very, very open, very inviting. It was very much about getting people involved. That was the number one goal, get more people to play with this," said Hohndel.

A couple of years in, from a very non-commercial beginning, came the first distributions with companies forming around them that were by hackers, for hackers, in Hohndel's opinion. This was a sign of what is so important about Linux and its community. After a few years into the project none of the people had the big changing the world type vision.

Hohndel said, "We didn't think about serious users, we're still doing this for ourselves. We were the target audience."