The first time Patrick Debois came into contact with Open Source was in the early stages of development of the Linux kernel, compiling it on floppies on his 486 machine. To tell you how long ago that was, the Intel 486 was introduced in 1989, It was the first chip in the line to include a built-in math coprocessor.
Patrick was an early adopter of computers, but one thing he missed was a community. In those days he had to copy software over electronic bulletin board systems. But with the Linux kernel, he found it amazing that you could just get it on a cd-rom and pass it around to friends.
From the Linux Foundation office in New York City, this is “The Untold Stories of Open Source”. Each week we choose an open source project or a person behind a popular open source initiative, to uncover the untold stories and details about major open source initiatives. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.