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By editorial@silicon.com, 15 May 2001 12:00

COMMENT The birth of the version 1.0 meant something new for Linus: the need for public relations. I would have been just as happy to have introduced the new version to the world pretty much the way I had introduced previous versions. I would write something on the newsgroup like "Version 1.0 is out. Deal with it." (Okay, not in those exact words.) A lot of other people thought it was much more of a big deal. They wanted version 1.0 for marketing purposes. There were all these budding commercial companies that had started to sell Linux. To them, version 1.0 was important for psychological, not technical, reasons. I couldn't disagree. The fact is, it looks bad when trying to sell version 0.96 of an operating system. I wanted it out because it was a milestone for me, and because it meant I could stop fixing bugs for a while and go back to development. The companies and the Linux community wanted to foist it onto the public in a major way. We needed a public relations strategy. I wasn't going to personally champion the effort. I wasn't interested in putting out press releases or making statements. Others thought it should be done that way, so others volunteered to pick up the torch. This was pretty much how Linux itself was done - and somehow, it all actually worked. Lars was one of the driving forces behind making that first official release a real event. He and a few others thought the university would be the most appropriate place to make the announcement. It made sense. My bedroom was too small. And it would have set the wrong precedent to host the announcement at a commercial site. So Lars volunteered to co-ordinate the event with the university. The computer sciences department at the University of Helsinki was small enough that he could just talk to head of the department. The University of Helsinki was more than happy to offer up the main auditorium of the computer sciences department for the introduction of Linux Version 1.0. And why not? How often does a university have anything worthy of television news? I did agree to give a talk. But it bore none of the horror of my Ede experience. Okay, some things were harder, now that I think about it. Like having my dad in the audience. And the fact that it was on Finnish TV. It was the first time I ever got to see myself on the television. Both of my parents were in the audience (but I'm fairly sure they weren't sitting together). Tove [Mrs Torvalds] was there too. It was the first time my dad met Tove, so for me it was more than just the announcement of version 1.0. Since I was involved in the last minute speech preparations, like making sure my slides were okay, I wasn't there when they actually met. That apparently happened when they were walking into the auditorium. Maybe I caught it out the corner of my eye. In that talk, and in virtually every other one over the next several years, I spoke not so much about the technology but about open source. It was nice. It changed some opinions about Linux inside the computer science department. Before that, Linux was something the computer science department was proud of, and mildly encouraged. But after the announcement, people within the department started taking Linux more seriously. After all, they had seen it on the news. In extracts 3 and 4 we find out what Linus has to say about the wider open source movement. Why does he think its time has come, why will it prove a robust development model? And remember, you can buy a complete copy of Just For Fun from silcon.com at the reduced price of £16.20 - http://www.silicon.com/goto-Linus-ex .