Linux Versus E. coli

In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn't find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system. Torvalds would later tellWired that his motives were not noble. "I didn't want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work," he said. "I wanted help." In his quest to avoid crap work, Torvalds unleashed a monster. People began to download the system, dubbed Linux, all over the world. Within ...