loloster

The same person who told me that the standards weren’t available also told me his area of interest was kernels, operating systems. He had this small area on [the FTP server] ftp.funet.fi, and he said: “hey, I’m putting a directory aside for you.” So he created the /pub/os/linux directory.

Linux was my working name, so in that sense he didn’t really name it, but I never wanted to release it as Linux. Linux was a perfectly good working name, but if I actually used it as the official one people would think that I am egomaniac, and wouldn’t take it seriously. So I chose this very bad name “Freax,” for “Free Unix.” Luckily, Ari Lemmke used this working name instead. And after that he never changed it.

#linux #name #origins