Interesting comparison with O'Reilly. Linus talks less but his words have more weight, Tim blogs, tweets, facebooks etc. frequently to get his word out.
Unix-inspired systems have traditionally often had the letter X in their name, e.g.: UNIX itself (ex Unics), Irix, AIX, Minix, NeXTStep, Xenix, HP/UX, Linux, Mac OS X in no particular order.
Of course not all do, e.g. Free/Open/NetBSD (though they were originally based on "BSD UNIX"), Solaris/SunOS, etc.
With that "should end in X" idea in mind, Linus chose to name it Freax (because it was a /free/ UNIX).
When he uploaded a very early version to an FTP server at Helsinki, his friend, who administered the server, changed the directory name from "freax" to "linux", thinking the latter was a much better name. Linus at first thought it would be too egotistical to name it that, but he let the name stick. I'm glad he did.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadOh you mean Linus, with an S
Interesting comparison with O'Reilly. Linus talks less but his words have more weight, Tim blogs, tweets, facebooks etc. frequently to get his word out.
edit: Oh I mean, for Linus.
Of course not all do, e.g. Free/Open/NetBSD (though they were originally based on "BSD UNIX"), Solaris/SunOS, etc.
When he uploaded a very early version to an FTP server at Helsinki, his friend, who administered the server, changed the directory name from "freax" to "linux", thinking the latter was a much better name. Linus at first thought it would be too egotistical to name it that, but he let the name stick. I'm glad he did.