:27:00
filled a very essential niche because
we had this great software,
:27:05
you could get it for nothing but
you couldn't get support - they made their money
:27:10
by charging for support.
:27:13
The GNU project started by building a toolkit,
:27:17
uh, basic development tools such as
a C compiler, a debugger, a text-editor,
:27:23
and uh, other necessary apparatus.
:27:27
And their intention was eventually to
develop a kernel to sit underneath those
:27:33
and be the center of the operating system.
:27:36
By about 1990 they had successfully
developed that toolkit,
:27:40
and it was in wide use on great many variants of Unix.
:27:45
But there was still no free kernel.
:27:48
The kernel happened to be
one of the last things we started to do
:27:54
and we had started it not long before.
:27:57
And that's when Linus Torvalds came along.
:28:01
"Lin-us" or "Line-us"? What's the exact,
do you prefer the pronunciation?
:28:05
um.. When I speak Swedish it's "Lee-nus";
:28:08
when I speak Finnish it's "Leen-ous";
:28:11
when I speak English it's "Line-us".
:28:13
And I really don't care how people pronounce my name.
:28:17
But "Linux" is always "Linux".
:28:20
He developed a kernel, and got it working
faster than we got ours working,
:28:26
and got it to work very nicely and solidly.
:28:29
His kernel is called "Linux".
:28:32
The initial goal was my very personal goal
:28:36
to be able to run a similar environment on my computer
:28:40
that I had grown used to at, at the university computers.
:28:46
And I could not find anything that suited me for that.
:28:53
So having been doing computers for all my life basically.
:28:57
At that point I decided that I'll do my own.