machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman celebrates 15 years of open source:

“Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. ‘Hello everybody out there using Minix,’ began the message, ‘I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) . . .’. Linus Torvalds couldn’t have been more wrong…”

Read the rest here.