Please excuse me if this is slightly OT, but it's important stuff!! I went to Linus' book-signing in Stockholm yesterday and finally got to meet our hero in person.
The event was organized as a kind of "press conference", where the "press" were the people waiting to buy a signed copy of the book. My guess, from looking at the number of "got root?" t-shirts versus the rest, is that of about 200 people present, less than half were actual Linux enthusiasts, the rest being those merely interested in the Linux phenomenon, and/or waiting to meet Linus. We got the chance to ask Linus some questions, but as soon as people started to get technical he asked us to tone it down to a more general level. So I asked him the question I posed here back in January (with no response): "When exactly is Linux's 10th birthday?" Linus thought for a moment, then said "Well it depends who you ask: My first posting to comp.os.minix, when I announced that I was working on Linux, was on August 25th, but the first time I made the souce code available for version 0.01 was September 17th. I would say, if you want to be really certain, you should party on both days." So it sound as if Linux, like the Queen of England, has two birthdays. Linus apparently has no strong feelings about which is the "official" one, so... Party, Party! -- Best regards, Peter Hugosson-Miller "Linux - the choice of a GNU generation!"
