I would imagine a lot of critics went up to him and proudly proclaimed that “Linux will never reach 1% marketshare!”
By calling them names, then getting on with the obvious…
Well, it was a hobby project, so there weren’t really any naysayers. Apart from Linus himself.
To quote an adorable snipped from the original release announcement: “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu” as well as “It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(”
Well, there was Andrew Tanenbaum, who AFAIR claimed that Linux was not a proper operating system, because it does not sport a microkernel or some such.
True-ish. He claimed that it was obsolete upon release because microkernels were the future. However, that turned out yo age like milk. It is, however, important to note that Torvalds and him remained on good terms despite this initial disagreement - It wasn’t really that big of a feud to begin with. It was somewhat heated in the moment, but they’ve remained mutually respecting friends
While there are several advantages to micro kernels, it doesn’t mean anything else is inferior.
There were also some other complaints from the same guy regarding specifically building for the I386 architecture, but considering how utterly dominant I386 would turn out to be, I th8nk this aspect of the criticism can be dismissed on its entirety.
Not sure what you mean? He didn’t really care. Linux started out as a hobby project, and became usable at around the time that the GNU userspace was mostly sufficient for a full system, the Hurd kernel project bogged down from technical overreach (maybe still is), and BSD was bogged down by licensing snags (later fixed). The GNU project by then had somewhat quieted its naysayers by releasing some very impressive userspace code such as GCC and Emacs. Plus the X window system was a thing. So once there was a runnable complete GNU/Linux/X system, maybe it wasn’t for everyone, but there weren’t real doubts about its viability. I guess there was always more uptake in the server space though, and it’s still like that.
I suppose I was asking for an inspirational story about all the hardships he faced with critics trying to shoot down his dreams and yet he took a deep breath and marched on despite the lack of appreciation for all the amazing work.
You can look at it the other way around too: Linus made a kernel, and enough people liked it that people developed Linux distributions, and it kept growing.
A lot of FOSS projects started as someone’s personal project they released (sometimes literally just to have stuff on their GitHub to be more hirable in job search) and it became insanely popular rapidly and now it powers entire ecosystems.
Not all projects starts with the ambition to become a big thing, and that’s usually how the really good stuff starts off as.
The Lounge started off as some users getting interested in Shout, which was just some guy’s pet project) and we forked it because we had a pile of patches for it to fix issues with it. I worked on it purely to serve my own purposes (just enough to IRC on the go without dealing with reconnecting to ZNC all the time and draining battery), and now it’s an active project a lot of IRC networks use as a guest client for their IRC network. No intent to disrupt the IRC clients landscape, I still used HexChat back then, but now it has secured a permanent spot in my open tabs as it does for many people. It’s actually a pretty good IRC client now.
I mean, he announced it as:
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready.
[…]
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.So, yeah, he wasn’t exactly claiming he’d revolutionize the world…
He co-authored a book in 2001. Containing a lot of autobiography and the story of Linux. It’s called “Just for fun”. If you’re interested in the long answer, you might want to read it. It’s nice to read, contains most of the anecdotes and goes quite into detail regarding your question.
This mighnt be exactly what your asking for, but i hope it helps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate
Oh Tanenbaum…
stallman wrote the first gpl in 1989 and gnu tools were put under it including gcc. so it already had history as far as open source which I would assume you are talking about with critics. like how can something free go anywhere.
