"
By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions
were already moot. Call it Linux, call it GNU/Linux;
the users had spoken. The 36-month window had closed,
meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its
HURD kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the
hard-core hacker community would have noticed. The
first Unix-like free software operating system was
here, and it had momentum. All hackers had left to do
was sit back and wait for the next major wave to come
crashing down on their heads. Even the shaggy-haired
head of one Richard M. Stallman.
Ready or not.
Open Source
In November , 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free
Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A
Quarter Century of Unix , issued a call for papers to
members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing
list. Salus, the conference's scheduled chairman,
wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming
Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and
sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event
promised to be the first engineering conference solely
dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with
other free software programmers, welcomed papers on
"any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD,
Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is
accessible and redistributable.
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