Fifteen years of LWN

Sometime around mid-1997, your editor and Liz Coolbaugh were discussing ways in which one might go about starting a business around the Linux operating system. As we watched the Unix wars and awaited the arrival of the universally-proclaimed operating system of the future (a thing called "Windows NT"), we realized that Linux was the best hope there was for those who wished to avoid a future dominated by proprietary, closed systems. Linux seemed to be going somewhere in a time when Unix-based systems as a whole were beginning to struggle, and we wanted to help it get there. And besides, working with Linux was a lot of fun.

The idea we went with was to form a support company joined into Red Hat's ill-fated support partner network. But how were we going to attract customers — and keep busy while waiting for those customers to show up? The idea we came up with was simple enough: start a web-based newsletter to help the world keep up with what was happening in the insanely fast-moving Linux world (the linux-kernel list sometimes carried a shocking 100 messages in a single day back then) and, at the same time, inform that world of just how clever and on top of the situation we were.

So that is what we set out to do. The first LWN.net server went on the net in January, 1998, though we would not acquire that domain until much later that year. It ran on an old machine in your editor's basement and served its content over a single ISDN line. We published the January 22 issue when we had something that looked somewhat reasonable, thus establishing the Thursday publication cycle without any conscious thought on the matter. One week later, with a second issue written (headlined by the timely announcement that the Netscape browser would be open-sourced), we sent a message to the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup telling the world of our existence, and life was never the same thereafter.

Like many business plans, ours failed to survive contact with the real world; a number of its successors fared no better. But, through it all, we kept LWN going. It didn't take long for the ISDN line to prove inadequate, even on a site with almost no image content at all. Linux began to take off for real as it led the final wave of the dotcom boom; LWN's readership rose with it. Eventually we realized that, while our various business schemes never seemed to get far, people were always interested in LWN. Far too late, we figured out that, perhaps, LWN was the business we'd been trying to build all along.

So, toward the end of 1999, we set ourselves to that task in earnest. Our long-suffering readers have heard much about our ups and downs over the years, but, by one obvious metric, LWN is a success: fifteen years after that first issue, LWN.net is still here. There is no shortage of work to do or things to improve, but somehow we seem to have found a way to do enough right to stick around.

We have watched Linux grow from a "hobbyist" system that few took seriously into the platform on which much of the world's computing is based. When we started, the number of people paid to work on Linux could perhaps have been tracked efficiently with an eight-bit variable; now it would be hard to even begin to guess how big the Linux employment market is. We have seen companies try to FUD Linux out of existence; others have tried to claim ownership of it. And we've seen Linux survive these challenges and more; Linux, too, is still here.

When LWN started, the community had no real idea of how to run a free software project involving hundreds or thousands of people. Those that tried often ran into trouble; the kernel process choked several times while others, like the project to make a workable browser out of the Netscape code, often seemed on the verge of collapsing under their own weight. The evolution of our software over the last fifteen years has been impressive, but the evolution of our community is doubly so. We can now take on projects that seemed unattainable even in the middle of dotcom boom optimism.

Fifteen years ago, we were a small, youthful band that thought it could change the world and have fun in the process. It is fair to say that both objectives were achieved nicely. Now we are numerous, older, professional, and tightly tied into the market economy; the wild-west days are mostly behind us. There will be plenty of work to do on Linux for a long time, but one might well ask: are our days of changing the world done?

The answer to that question is almost certainly "no." We have, at this point, succeeded in the creation of a large body of software that is not under the control of any one person or company. That software now forms the platform used for the growing swarm of ubiquitous devices; as these devices get smaller and cheaper, they will only become more prevalent. We have established the expectation that the code for these devices should be available and free, and we have promoted the idea that the devices themselves should be open and hackable. But we have not yet fully created the basis for free computing and, with it, a more free society. There is a lot of work to be done yet in that area.

When LWN got its start, our community's objective was simple, create a freer, better Unix. We have long since crossed that one off the list; now we need a better operating system for the devices — and the challenges — of the future. The problem is that we don't yet know what that operating system needs to look like. Unix embodies a great many solid design principles, but a system that was designed for slow terminals on minicomputers cannot be expected to be ideal for a phone handset, much less for hardware that we cannot yet envision. The system must evolve, perhaps in ways that cause it to diverge considerably from its Unix roots. Guiding that evolution without fragmenting our community or losing our focus on freedom will be one of our biggest challenges in the coming years.

The next fifteen years, in other words, promise to be just as interesting as the last fifteen were; here at LWN, we plan to continue to be a part of our community as those years play out. LWN, too, will need to evolve to best meet the community's needs, but, like Linux, we will evolve while keeping that community's values at heart. Thousands of you, the best readers one could possibly ask for, have sustained us for these years and helped to keep us honest. It is our hope to serve all of you even better in the coming years. It has been quite a ride; thank you all for letting us be a part of it. We are looking forward to seeing where it takes us next.

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